


Not a Human AU

by maniacalmole



Category: Good Omens - Neil Gaiman & Terry Pratchett
Genre: M/M, Slow Burn, a ‘what if we were human. How would we be different’ kind of question, in the end you’re good how you are and you are in fact everything, not a human AU
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-09-14
Updated: 2019-09-18
Packaged: 2020-10-17 11:10:55
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 16
Words: 33,753
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20620067
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/maniacalmole/pseuds/maniacalmole
Summary: Aziraphale knows Crowley has a crush and doesn't know what to do about it.Aziraphale wasn’t sure if he considered himself ‘alive’ or not. What would he do if he had to live a life?We may not be people,Crowley thought.But I do—I do want.





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> To the Good Omens fandom, thank you so much for letting me figure out what emotions are through the hearts of this poor angel and this poor demon. I love them. I hope you enjoy it as much as I do :)
> 
> (If you want a prequel to these events, you can read "Connectivity Issues". But I originally wrote this as its own story, and the styles of the two are pretty different, so it works on its own, too.)

When Aziraphale went out, he typically wore at least three layers of clothing.

Certainly, in the Beginning, there hadn’t been any clothes at all. But after the Fall things had changed. For a good few centuries at least, the custom in Europe had been layers. These days he wore an undershirt, a collared shirt, and usually a vest or jumper. Then there was his jacket, or an overcoat, or sometimes both. Some of his scarves, Crowley said, could count as a conservative layer of clothing all on their own.*

*He usually said this about ten minutes before taking them from him and wrapping himself in them, the poor cold-blooded thing.

Aziraphale wore a brown sweater _and_ his camel-hair coat when he met Crowley outside his shop to be driven to the Ritz, a decision which earned him a shake of the demon’s head.

“What is it with you and beige?”

“What’s wrong with beige?”

Crowley shrugged as he opened the door to the Bentley for him—how many years had he been doing that?—and Aziraphale got in. “It’s such an in-between color,” he said. He walked around the other side of the car and got in, but instead of starting it, he turned in his seat to face him. “Not really bright, not really dark. Just beige. It’s dull.”

“What is it with you and black and white?” Aziraphale glanced down at the demon’s clothes and then back at his face, which Crowley twisted to show that he couldn’t deny the angel’s point. Crowley wore his usual white shirt and black jacket. That was at least two layers, but they were significantly thinner than any of Aziraphale’s clothes. The fabric of Crowley’s clothes seemed to get thinner with every passing decade. It was as though he was trying to whittle away anything that was separating him from the rest of the world.

Or maybe that was just the way they made clothes these days. Crowley never actually bought them from stores, but he always paid close attention to these sorts of things. Aziraphale still wore fabrics of a sturdier build, like they made in the old days, which was why he could still wear the same clothes that he’d worn _in_ the old days, but fifty years later.

Crowley had noticed that Aziraphale was still looking at him. His face had gotten a tight look around the lips, like he was trying not to smile. Aziraphale looked away—there could be none of that.

After a moment, Crowley started the car, and they were on their way to brunch.

Aziraphale wasn’t sure why he was doing this. Why _they_ were doing this. There was nothing in particular they needed to talk about. Nothing to discuss. It wasn’t as though the Arrangement still held up, after Armageddon had been effectively canceled. They didn’t have anything they needed to do for each other.

Just another morning spending time in each other’s company, as though it were the most normal thing in the world.

“Can’t believe we haven’t done brunch at the Ritz in so long,” Crowley said.

“It’s your sleep schedule,” Aziraphale murmured. “You never wake up early enough.”

“I’m _awake_ early enough,” Crowley said. When Aziraphale gave a doubtful huff, he went on, “I have a routine! It takes time to pick out these black and white clothes, you know.”

He was casting Aziraphale a sly grin, but Aziraphale was determinedly staring straight ahead. Or, he had _tried_ to, but from the fact that he had just _noticed_ Crowley’s sly grin, the angel reluctantly had to admit that he must have glanced at his face for at least a moment. Bugger.

They made it to the restaurant and sat at their usual table, which admittedly looked different in daylight. The candles were gone. Brunch was still one of the more _sentimental_ of mealtimes. Aziraphale wondered if Crowley had done this on purpose.

_You’re being paranoid_, he thought. But he couldn’t help noticing that the table between them seemed smaller than it usually did.

As though reading his mind, Crowley, once he’d sat down, immediately leaned far back, sprawling across the back of his chair in that ridiculous way he did. He didn’t look at Aziraphale. Just grinned at the tablecloth.

“So,” Aziraphale said. “What is the—er—plan?”

Crowley’s grin faded and he continued to stare, seemingly lost in thought. For once, Aziraphale wished it were the demon saying something to break the silence, pulling _him_ out of his thoughts and back into the present, like it always used to be. Like they were normal.

“I thought,” Crowley said, slowly, “we might see a movie.”

Aziraphale blinked, as though he had no idea what a ‘movie’ was. Then his brow creased. “You mean at the cinema?”

Crowley’s mouth quirked. “Yes,” he said. “The ‘cinema’.”

Aziraphale frowned. “You know I don’t particularly enjoy going to the cinema.”

“But this is different.”

“Really? How so.”

Crowley paused. “It’s a different movie from what we saw last time.”

Aziraphale rolled his eyes.

“And you can get popcorn.”

“I don’t want—”

“I know you say you don’t like it, but _angel_, last time you ate half of mine before the trailers were through.”

Aziraphale blushed. “It’s not that I don’t _like_ popcorn. I just don’t particularly _want_ popcorn.” It always made him feel a bit queasy. And he really couldn’t stop eating it. Dangerous stuff.

Crowley opened his mouth and started to say “And why—” but he cut himself off, biting his tongue and scrunching up in his seat in a peculiar way. His tone was so different lately. His usual wry self was there, underneath, he could hardly keep that concealed, but there was a—_carefulness_ to it all that made Aziraphale uncomfortable precisely because of the fact that it was there in an attempt not to let that very thing happen—at least not too far.

Luckily, they were prevented from having to say more about Aziraphale’s popcorn eating habits by the arrival of their waiter.

Over the course of their brunch, they discussed alternatives to the ‘cinema’. Aziraphale wanted to go to the museum, but Crowley insisted they had been too many times that month. ‘Let some new history happen before we go again, it always does eventually.’ Crowley suggested a concert of which he knew very well the angel would not approve. They both halfheartedly brought up several other possibilities that they both knew would be far too crowded for their tastes. In the end, Crowley circled back to the movies.

“It’s one you’ll _like_,” he said. “Trust me.”

“It’s not that I don’t _trust you_, dear boy,” Aziraphale said, scraping frustratedly at his plate in an attempt to round up the last bits of his egg. “It’s just that I suspect you don’t entirely know for certain what kind of ‘films’ I like. Not enough for me to risk sitting in a cinema with sticky floors and people less than a meter away from you and—well—other features.”

“’Suspecting’ is the exact opposite of trust, you know,” Crowley said, one corner of his mouth pulling up. He sat back and crossed his arms. His plate still had a third of his food on it.

Aziraphale gave up on the eggs and sighed. “Fine, then. I don’t trust your taste in ‘movies’.”

“And I _suspect_ your ability to judge what you should and shouldn’t trust is imperfect,” Crowley shot back. “You’ll like it, and that’s the truth. I _know you_.”

He sounded pleased with himself. Aziraphale was still thinking about that half-smile of his from before, in the car, when he’d caught him looking, trying to decide if there had been any hope in it. Trying to see if there was anything he needed to snuff out.

“You don’t know _everything_ about me,” Aziraphale said, weakly. It was a sorry argument.

Crowley only raised an eyebrow. He looked down at Aziraphale’s plate. The angel tried not to stare at Crowley’s, tried not to stare at _him_, but there were only so many places one could look at a tiny little table like this.

“Sure, I don’t,” Crowley said. Then, his tone suddenly becoming bright and cheery, “Want the rest of my breakfast?”

“Pancakes,” Aziraphale said, not hiding his disgust. “At the Ritz. Since when did they start offering that sort of thing?”

“They’re really _good_,” the demon said in a horribly singsong voice.

“With _chocolate chips_, of all things.”

“Wouldn’t’ve been the full experience without them.”

“And you’ve doused them in syrup,” Aziraphale tutted. “Must you try to be so American?”

“If you can change the vintage of a wine, then I’m allowed to give the table some real authentic maple syrup,” Crowley said. He pushed the plate forward with one hand. Aziraphale scowled. Crowley beamed. “It’s like cake, angel. I know you’re missing your usual since we’re here so early.”

“It’s breakfast,” Aziraphale said. “And it’s _not_ breakfast, anyway. It’s brunch. Just because you only got up an hour ago doesn’t mean—you’re not dragging me into your awful schedule.”

“You got up at noon back when it was the fashionable thing to do, with your fancy artist friends a century or two ago, and don’t deny it.”

Aziraphale squirmed. Crowley grinned. It felt like the old days, with the demon making the angel feel inordinately uncomfortable and _tempted_ and just guilty enough to fill his quota, thereby not having to feel guilty about the fact that he was spending time with the demon at all. Not that he’d felt guilty about that in ages. Not since he’d come to consider him his friend. His best friend. And then it all came crashing down, just by Aziraphale _noticing_ something, something different in the way Crowley was around him, as though Crowley was wanting to somehow topple them right back to the way they were before, right back to that horrid _awkwardness_. As though now that they had finally gotten to the point where them being in each other’s presence wasn’t anything to make note of, where they could be close to each other without hardly even noticing, now Crowley wanted them to notice. Now he had to make a point of it. Until Aziraphale had finally caught on, and perhaps, though he hadn’t entirely meant to, he had spooked the poor demon. Now Crowley was even worse, because now he always sounded so bloody _careful_.

Perhaps it was better if Aziraphale had inadvertently scared him off, after all.

But now, Crowley looked like his old self. There was no self-consciousness in the way he slid his plate forward, across the whole pitifully tiny table, towards the angel. He raised his eyebrows and Aziraphale, with yet another sigh, couldn’t help but smile and take it.

“At least let me tell you the plot,” Crowley said.

“I’m sure it will be most enthralling,” Aziraphale replied. “But will it be so enthralling that I don’t notice the smell of weeks-old beer on the goodness-knows-why _carpeted_ floors? Doubtful, my dear.”

Crowley scoffed, and Aziraphale, satisfied, picked up the demon’s fork and mentally prepared himself to try some of these _chocolate-chip pancakes_.

One thing Aziraphale had _always_ noticed, even from way back when it had first started, was the way Crowley watched him when he gave him his leftover food.

At first it had been an almost sly expression across his face as millennia-ago Aziraphale had tentatively accepted what the demon swore he didn’t want. ‘He was full. No, really, go ahead. Why let it go to waste?’ He had watched him like he was seeing if he would take the bait. To combat this, Aziraphale had eaten every last bite with affected indifference, refusing to accept this display of metaphor. And Crowley, ignoring this, watched his ‘temptation’ work. He would sit back and smile.

At some point, the sly expression had transitioned into a front. The metaphoric temptation became a mere excuse for the demon’s actions, and this was a fact of which they were both aware. Crowley had nothing to prove. He still gave him food. Aziraphale accepted it.

Centuries passed, it became a habit. No one needed a motivation for continuing a habit. Crowley watched Aziraphale like he was looking for something anyway.

Then, for a brief time, while they were working together to try to raise Warlock and avert the Apocalypse—there had been a time when Crowley had looked at him with pure, undisguised contentment. He just, for whatever reason, wanted to share. He would wait for Aziraphale to finish whatever dessert he had ordered, then he would push over his own plate, untouched, and the angel would accept it, and Crowley would nod, and smile, with nothing but calm joy that he had given him something. No pretenses at all. Just a gift. Aziraphale might have fallen in love with him then—

—if he did that sort of thing.

But Aziraphale, wrapped in so many layers of cotton and wool that you could spend eternity unraveling them, didn’t go around falling for things.

Crowley was watching him now. Aziraphale tried to ignore it. He sliced the spongey cake with the edge of his fork, speared it and raised it to his lips. But right when he closed his mouth around it, the bittersweet taste of the chocolate chips startlingly strong, his glance flickered back up to the demon’s face. Watching. Crowley pressed his lips together and looked down at the tablecloth. Aziraphale forgot to chew. He let the dark chocolate melt in his mouth, not looking away from Crowley’s face. He slid the fork out of his mouth and felt his own lips pressed against each other.

“It’s historical,” Crowley said. His voice was quieter than usual, because there was no use pretending he hadn’t just come out of something like a trance.

Aziraphale swallowed.

“It’s about—uh—” He had to clear his throat to sound more normal. “Queen Victoria.”

“Again?” Aziraphale said, his dismay allowing him to somewhat snap out of his wayward thoughts.

“No, no,” Crowley laughed. “This one’s about someone who worked for her.”

“It will still inevitably be about her,” Aziraphale said. “Humans these days. What _is_ their fascination—?”

“With Victoria? What was your fascination at the time? You really ought to let me go, you know,” Crowley said. “I could learn a lot about the time I missed. Otherwise someday _you’re_ going to have to tell me all about that whole century.”

“I doubt they’ll be showing much of the century that I was having,” Aziraphale said. “Believe it or not, I didn’t play nanny to the queen’s children the whole time you were asleep.”

Crowley snorted. He put his hands up in surrender. “If you hate the ‘cinema’ so much,” he said, “then will you at least let me play it on the screen in my flat? It’ll be a big hit, they’ll’ve made plenty of money on it without the price of our tickets.”

Aziraphale considered it. He thought about the smell of old popcorn. Then he thought about Crowley’s flat. The scent of plants and growing green things in the darkened room as they sat on the sofa, farther apart than they were sitting now. The screen lighting up the room in flashes during the brighter scenes, then going black and silent. Only the two of them.

“Let’s go to the cinema,” he said brusquely. He added, “If you’re so keen on it.”

“What changed your mind?” Crowley asked, and then, damningly, looked like he regretted it as soon as the words were out of his mouth. He could be too clever, sometimes. Aziraphale winced.

“I want popcorn,” he said, quickly.


	2. Chapter 2

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> In which they fumble about looking for something to do with as much ineptitude as I do whenever my friends and I try to think of a fun way to hang out.

Crowley was always surprised by Aziraphale’s perception of time, no matter how many millennia he had known him for, which was, he supposed, a bit ironic on his part. The angel still thought a month was nothing. It had been two weeks since they’d gone to the cinema. He hadn’t even seen him at all in a little over a week. That had just been him stopping by the bookshop to say ‘hi’. At least the angel hadn’t acted as though that were out of the ordinary. It had been a long time since he’d glared at him suspiciously, or even irritably, when Crowley had walked in to say hello without any sort of ulterior purpose for visiting. Then again, maybe he did have an ulterior motive. But it was linked very closely to the one that made him want to simply say ‘hello’, in fact they both might even be the same thing, so Crowley didn’t consider it worth looking at more closely.

Anyway, the angel’s sense of time was messed up, and that was all there was to it.

He didn’t see how he could sit there and do nothing but read, work on fixing old things, work on finding old things in catalogs, and write letters to old friends whom he’d met at conferences for people who liked fixing old things who all lived all around the world and whom Aziraphale never actually went out and saw. Except for when those conferences came around once a year, which Aziraphale had said once was ‘plenty often enough to keep up a good friendship’, with full sincerity, as though he’d believed it.

Crowley’d had to take a long, hot bath just to warm himself back up after the chilling revelation.

Now, he was saying that they had just gone to brunch two weeks ago, and wasn’t it a little soon to go out again? Crowley hadn’t said they had to go to the Ritz. He hadn’t even said ‘brunch’, just ‘Are you hungry, or do you plan on being hungry any time within the next few days?’ They could have gone anywhere. People _went_ _to_ _restaurants_. If they were human, it wouldn’t have seemed odd at all. Humans only had so many weeks and months and opportunities to eat good food with someone they—with friends. Why the angel had to act like it had to be a special occasion* for them to go anywhere at all, he would never know.

*Of which they had very few, not having any real birthdays, and having lived through enough holidays that came and went to be a bit skeptical or at the very least forgetful of those as well.

It could have been, of course, that Crowley had made a mistake.

It could be that Aziraphale was so hesitant to go ‘out’ with him now, to go to the movies or restaurants or just a bloody walk in the park, because of what Crowley had betrayed…what he had done. Given himself away. He hardly even knew how. Just a look, or something he’d said, or the way he’d said it. And an accidental admission for wanting something. He’d seen the look on Aziraphale’s face when all of a sudden, he _knew_.

Or did he. Did he know? He couldn’t be sure. It was agonizing.

But then again, Aziraphale had been like this for as long as he’d known him. Time was just different for the angel. It hadn’t been much more difficult to get him to agree to get lunch today than it had been every other time in the past, truth be told. Which meant that Crowley should have nothing to worry about.

Or, it meant that even though Crowley did have something to worry about, and Aziraphale did know, he wanted to spend time with him anyway.

Crowley had cursed himself time and time again for always picking the worrying option to believe in, to _hope for_, but it was always the only one that had the possibility of an outcome that was worth a damn.

He hadn’t taken the car today. It was a sunny day, and his legs could do with a stretch. All of him could, really. His whole life felt cramped. He had recommended a restaurant that was farther than they would usually walk, but surprisingly, the angel had agreed. Perhaps he really had gotten sick of the demon’s driving.

He met Aziraphale at his front door—trying not to read too much into the fact that the angel hadn’t had him come inside, it wasn’t as though he hadn’t invited him in to their usual after-dinner _thing_, after all—and the two of them set off down the road. It was too warm for Aziraphale to wear his coat. He was also wearing a light green sweater-vest today. That was at least two fewer articles of beige.

Their greeting had been friendly enough. Now, they were quieter than usual. Or perhaps not. Perhaps he’d taken the comfortable quiet between them for granted before. _Stop reading too deep_, Crowley thought, grinding his teeth.

“Why is it always food?” Aziraphale asked thoughtfully.

“What?”

“When we meet, I mean. Why are we always going out to—going to eat somewhere?”

Crowley shrugged. “Just what people do, I s’pose.”

“Yes, but we’re not people.” Aziraphale glanced to his side at Crowley, who had winced, and said, “Sorry, my dear—but I mean, we’re not human. It’s not as though we need to spend hours of our daily lives consuming food in order to _live_. It’s more of a—more of a—”

“A choice?” Crowley said.

“An option.”

“A bonus?”

“Something we treat ourselves to every now and then,” the angel said decisively. “Only we act as though it’s inevitable.”

“S’more of a habit, if you ask me,” Crowley grumbled. “At least for my part. And anyway, what would you rather we do? Go bowling?”

Aziraphale shot him a look as though the very implication that he would ever bowl was an insult.

“Or mini-golf, perhaps?”

“Really, my dear.”

Crowley was feeling that warm growing feeling inside him that came from being very, very fond of the angel’s less flattering qualities. He’d noticed it from the very start, but he was noticing it a lot more lately. Things that made him frown and shake his head also made him laugh and sigh because he knew he wouldn’t change it, not at thing. Aziraphale was walking very primly now with his nose up in the air as if to show him that he was above his silly teasing, and Crowley wouldn’t change a thing. He often wondered if that was it. Because when you finally let yourself accept that this was how you felt about them, then you could look at them all over again and there was no ‘yes, but they’re not so perfect’ and no ‘sure I like them, but not enough to worry about, there are things about them that I wouldn’t exactly call _adorable_.’ There was none of that pretending like any of that mattered anymore. He was adored, and Crowley could finally look at him, and all of these things that drove him mad, he could simply look at and think, _even this. I like this, too_. And that made it all almost dazzling.

Which was why it was difficult to stop pressing his buttons.

“Or perhaps you’re above that, and would prefer to graduate to real golf?”

“Perhaps leave the sporting activities behind, dear boy.”

“Does fishing count as ‘sporting’?”

Aziraphale side-eyed him. “Perhaps you’d like to consider something indoors?”

“Like dancing?” Crowley couldn’t help but grin. “You always liked dancing.”

“I liked _one_ dance,” said the angel, growing rather red. “And I don’t remember you being so keen on the idea, back then.”

Crowley cursed his past self for throwing out the opportunity, but he soldiered on. “Or music. We could take up musical instruments. I know, angel, we should _start a band_.”

Aziraphale looked completely blank. Crowley realized he had gone so far beyond improbability that the angel genuinely could not comprehend the suggestion. He backed down a notch.

“We could join an orchestra?”

“Pah,” Aziraphale said, resuming walking. “Joining an orchestra. We wouldn’t even be able to talk to each other.”

That did it. Something about that, the angel saying he wanted to _talk_ to him, made something well up inside of Crowley. He stopped walking. Aziraphale had been a bit ahead and didn’t notice.

“Not that I wouldn’t appreciate you using your musical talent for something other than naming the composers of film scores, for once. You always did have a knack for it. What was it you played? Piano? Or was it before the piano? Anyway, you had such a nice touch, and I never understood how you could listen to the things you do on that radio of yours when I _know_ you have taste. Where did you learn to play, anyway? You never told me. Only sat down and started playing at that social gathering we were at together, I don’t even remember when. I do wish you’d play more. Though I suppose neither of us has an instrument. I’m sure it wouldn’t go with your flat’s _theme_ of—whatever it is, minimizing, miniaturing, minimalism, that’s it, atrocious style, wish we’d go back to something with warmer colors.”

All of that. The good and the bad. Crowley loved it. It was _too much_.

Aziraphale had finally noticed he wasn’t by his side. He turned and looked for him, spotted him, and walked back a few paces, one hand holding the other awkwardly. “Crowley? Are you all right?”

Crowley nodded. He thought about the piano that he ‘had used to play’. He’d only ever played around the angel once.

“Was it what I said about the radio?” Aziraphale asked worriedly. “You know I never cared for bebop. Don’t listen to silly old me.”

The corner of Crowley’s mouth twitched. He tried to snap himself out of it. He stared.

“We could go bowling, if you really wanted to.”

Petulant criticism and absurd kindness. _That_ snapped him out of it.

Crowley laughed. “Come on, angel.”

They continued down the street, Crowley trying to keep his snickering to a minimum as Aziraphale fretted about the cleanliness of the rental shoes.

“And I don’t know how you’re going to wear them, what with your feet and all. You’ll have to get an absurdly large size.”

“Angel, we are _not_ going bowling.”

Aziraphale seemed to realize he’d been joking, now, because he looked more peeved than relieved. “Well, we can do whatever you want, only I am _not_ putting on someone else’s shoes.”

_What I want_, Crowley thought. And he said, with a sly grin, “Why are we doing whatever_ I_ want?” And he bumped his shoulder into the angel’s.

Aziraphale turned pink again. He looked nervous. As though he realized he may have been too friendly, too much as though he were hinting at something that he hadn’t meant.

_But I do want to know_, Crowley thought. _Why would you do what I wanted?_

“Because I haven’t had a chance yet to mention anything _I’d_ like to do,” the angel said huffily, but it was a faked kind of huff, just for propriety’s sake.

“Well, go on, then,” Crowley said, genuinely curious, but also still thinking, _Why do you always give me what I want?_

The angel was silent. His brow was slightly furrowed. Crowley wondered if he was worried that Crowley might be thinking the very thing he was thinking.

But then he said, “I think I might like boating, actually.”

“_Boating?_”

“Well, not fishing,” Aziraphale clarified. “I can’t go around killing fish. All creatures great and small, you know, _and_ _don’t go saying anything about sushi because it’s different when you’re the one doing it and you know it_. But it might be nice to be on the water again.”

Crowley had an absurd image of the angel in a sailor hat appear before his mind’s eye before he stopped to consider what type of ‘boating’ the angel may have done in the past. The image converted itself to one of early-mid-twentieth century cruises for people in white suits and big sunhats, and he had almost settled on this being the more likely option when the remembrance of sandals popped into his head and ruined the whole thing all over again.

Aziraphale was starting to look a bit concerned. Crowley thought he was probably already changing his mind about the boats.

“On second thought,” the angel said.

“Never mind boats,” Crowley said reassuringly. Aziraphale gave him a grateful look. “The pond at St. James enough for you?”

“There.” The angel beamed. “You see? Simple is always better.”

They walked on. Crowley thought about the embroidery on some of Aziraphale’s cravats, but didn’t mention it. ‘Simple’ indeed, he thought with a grin. “See, doing ‘whatever _I_ want’ is not so bad, is it?”

“You’ve proven all my doubts wrong, dear boy.”

“It’s not so very _treacherous_, doing something I suggest, now is it?”

“Well, that’s what I meant, really,” Aziraphale said. “Not, ‘Come up with something special’, we don’t need _special_, we just need—well, nothing really.”

Crowley nodded.

“I mean, we can do whatever you want. I meant, because I don’t much mind.”

_ What I want_, Crowley was thinking. _I want_.

“Any little thing we do will be fine, I’m sure,” Aziraphale said. “They always are.”

“Exactly,” Crowley said.

Aziraphale had started humming, his step much more at ease. Crowley couldn’t help watching him out of the corner of his eye. The angel said, “A walk by the water would be _perfect_.”

His voice was like his humming, low, constant, content, grounding. Crowley thought, _I want_.

“Don’t you agree?”

_Marry me._

“We’re probably fussing over nothing. You and I are better suited for a walk around the park than any sort of grand thing.”

“Right, you’re absolutely right.” Crowley’s mind was reeling, but he had already had the thought, and so he thought it again. _Let’s get married_.

Which was silly, because he didn’t really want to get married. Not really, of course not, because what even was marriage? Something people had made up, and gotten all wrong so many times, and maybe the image that some of them _now_ had in their heads of a romantic marriage had never really existed, maybe it was an ideal that they made up to cover up the fact that this thing they had invented didn’t always work out so great, maybe it was just a dream they had made, or maybe it was a dream they were chasing, a dream come true, and maybe he just wanted to chase it too. That was what he meant when he thought, _Let’s get married_. He meant, Do you see what they’re dreaming of? Do you see the way they try to treat each other? Let’s do that, _please_, let us do that, too.

They walked on, Aziraphale’s hum taking on an almost nautical tune. The warm breezy air almost tasted salty. Crowley flicked out his tongue, and was reminded, all too suddenly, of how very not-human he was.

_We may not be people,_ he thought. He lagged behind Aziraphale, just a step, just so he could watch him without the angel noticing. _But I do—I do want_.

They had lunch. They talked. Aziraphale didn’t even know what about. They figured something out to talk about, they _always_ did.

They’d made it to St. James’s and avoided the crowd as best they could. The crowd of ducks was, of course, inevitable, at this point of their long history of having been too friendly with them. They had shuffled through their feathered fans and walked, side by side, through the gentle breeze.

His cheeks grew warm as he thought about the things he had said beforehand.

He’d rather panicked back there, he was afraid. What had he been thinking? ‘Whatever you want.’ What Crowley wanted was—well, he tried not to think about it. But he couldn’t just say, ‘Actually, forget it, I don’t care what you want.’ It simply wasn’t true. He wanted him to be happy. Of course he did, they were friends, weren’t they?

Aziraphale didn’t want him thinking he was up for _anything_.

But he didn’t want him thinking that he didn’t want him _around_. Truthfully, he didn’t want him thinking about him much at all.

He’d tried to smooth it out with all that talk about the ‘simple’ life. They didn’t need more than that, really. He’d absolutely meant everything he’d said. He was perfectly content.

Since when had Crowley ever been happy with ‘content’?

Aziraphale was always impressed with the way Crowley lived every year like he had to make it count. Sometimes he wasn’t entirely pleased with the activities with which Crowley chose to _fill_ his years, but he was impressed, nonetheless. He went through time like he had to make every single year matter. Sometimes he lived every _month_ like it was his last. For goodness’ sake, sometimes it was every _week_, even every _day_. Aziraphale had no idea where he got the energy.

He supposed it was something he had picked up from humans. ‘Live every moment like it’s your last, because it just might be’. Of course, Crowley didn’t have to worry about that, but he was more sensitive to that kind of thing than he would ever admit. You only live a life once, Aziraphale supposed. What was it people said these days? _YOLALO_. Something like that. Well, certainly it was true, but they happened to live once for a _very long time_, so he didn’t really see why Crowley made such a fuss about it.

They weren’t really living ‘lives’, anyway, since by some definitions you needed to be able to die to really live. They could be annihilated, in a sense, but that sort of threat only came up once in a blue moon—less often, in fact—and Aziraphale had the notion that it was the _guarantee_ of limited time that made humans the way they were. They had an expiration date. They knew they only had so long, so they wouldn’t want to waste any of it.

What would he do, the angel thought, if he had to live such a way? Knowing that every passing second brought you closer to a certain end? Maybe he would spend less time indoors. Maybe he would try more new things. Maybe he would spend less time reading. Almost certainly not, for that last one, but the others were a possibility.

In fact, it was possible that if he knew he only had so long on Earth, he would spend _all_ of his time reading, because what other way could he possibly have to see all of it, every marvel in this huge and incomprehensible world?

At any rate, he still wouldn’t drive his automobile quite so fast as Crowley did, and he suspected the demon wouldn’t either if mortality was a greater issue for him.

Crowley, though, said it made him feel ‘alive’. Usually he grinned, teeth clenched, as he said this, pushing his foot on the accelerator to the floor and flinging them both back in their seats, and though he wore his shades Aziraphale still knew he had a gleam in his eye. Sometimes, though, Crowley sounded wistful. This did a funny thing to Aziraphale, making him feel odd, like he was sad and excited at the same time, like he felt bad for the demon and a little jealous of him, also.

Aziraphale wasn’t sure if he considered himself ‘alive’ or not. He usually did, for the sake of easy comparison, to distinguish himself from beings who had been snuffed out of existence and who were not currently ‘experiencing’ things. He wasn’t sure that was the same thing as being alive, though. Having a life to fill all on his own. What would he do if he had to live a life?

Well. He never thought he could possibly live it like Crowley.

Not that stepping into the pond at St. James’s was really ‘living like today was your last.’ It was more like ‘living like you didn’t care whether or not the bottoms of your trouser legs got wet.’ He hadn’t even rolled them up. Just stepped right in. Had to step over the miniscule railing that was supposed to block the way, not that it was that much of a barrier, but still, it was the principle of the thing.

“_Dear_ boy,” Aziraphale called from quite a ways back, as though the distance between them could prevent others from thinking they knew each other, even as he yelled at him. “What are you doing?”

Crowley yelled back something which, because he was facing out over the water with his back to the angel, Aziraphale did not catch in the slightest.

“What?”

Crowley turned, splashing about a bit. He waved. Aziraphale realized with a start that he was trying to get him to _come over_, the ridiculous thing. The angel crossed his arms and shook his head, trying to look resolute.

“You said you wanted to be on the water,” the demon shouted.

“_On_ the water, not in it!”

Crowley laughed, until a territorial goose started to swim his way, and he had to hop on one foot for a bit to scooch away while attempting not to fall over. Aziraphale felt an unbearable wave of something that made him giggle. He covered his mouth with one hand and was sure he had turned pink, and he was glad the demon hadn’t been able to see him.

The goose had been evaded. Crowley wiped his brow and regained his balance. He waved at Aziraphale again, more insistently this time.

“Because misery loves company,” Aziraphale muttered.

“What?”

“Why on Earth would I go over there now?” the angel shouted more loudly.

“It feels nice!”

Aziraphale took a few steps closer, only so he wouldn’t have to yell his next words so loudly. He stepped over the railing, carefully pulling up his own trouser-legs before doing so, and made his way as cautiously as he could towards the pond without stepping in anything.

“The water’s great,” Crowley said with a grin as the angel got closer.

“Do you know,” Aziraphale hissed, “how much goose—_product_—is probably in the mud beneath your feet?”

Crowley’s grin dropped. His face turned pale, and he sloshed his way out of the pond, so quickly that Aziraphale had to step aside to avoid being splashed. He stepped forward again when Crowley’s foot got stuck in a particularly sticky batch of mud and he almost fell over, barely catching himself on the arm the angel had offered.

“What _were_ you thinking?” Aziraphale tutted as he helped Crowley right himself.

“S’hot,” the serpent muttered. Aziraphale snorted. “It would’ve been a good idea, without the ducks.”

“If only for the ducks,” Aziraphale said commiseratingly. Crowley still clung to him as he pulled them both away from the pond and back over the railing, towards the relative safety of the rule-abiding park grounds. It didn’t look as though Crowley were doing it on purpose. He looked embarrassed, and shaky, probably from the cold and muddy feet, and so Aziraphale felt he had nothing to worry about. Which made it different. It felt different, helping Crowley, having him hold onto him like that, when he had nothing to worry about. His arm felt warm. It was nice, a relief, the way things should be. Crowley let go.

“Nks,” the demon murmured, rubbing his own arm.

“You’ve got mud on the bottoms of your trousers,” Aziraphale said. His voice came out quieter than he’d been expecting.

Crowley looked down at his feet and gave a wry laugh.

“You ought to have at least rolled them up a bit first.”

“Can’t. At least, not in public.”

Aziraphale frowned. He’d said it in the falsely bright tone he used whenever he was pretending as though something didn’t bother him. “Why not?”

Crowley looked around. No one seemed to be nearby. Aziraphale had a feeling the demon had probably subconsciously evacuated the area to keep his pond-breaking free from witnesses. He bent over and pulled up his trouser leg ever so slightly.

Aziraphale had already known that Crowley’s shoes weren’t really shoes. He’d said something about the curse not ever going away fully, and he hadn’t questioned it since. Now he saw that the scales went up a ways on the demon’s ankle, gradually fading from shining little flakes to skin. They went from splotches to spots to one or two glimmering on his shins.

“Hard to pass them off as socks,” Crowley said, standing back up. “Even in today’s world of fashion.”

“You could perhaps say they’re sheer leggings,” Aziraphale said. The demon gave him a look. It was—relief, perhaps. _When will you ever get over_, he thought, _me not being startled by you? I know what you are. You’re_—

Well, he wasn’t human. He was demon, he supposed. But he wasn’t frightening in the least, at least not in ways he couldn’t help, and he certainly didn’t need to hide it. Not from him.

Crowley gave him a tentative smile, looking embarrassed again. Aziraphale huffed. Faked, once again, but this time for a better reason. He looked away and raised his eyebrows. “Can’t believe you showed me your ankles.”

“What?” Crowley exclaimed.

“It’s positively _scandalous_.”

“Oh, for—it’s the twenty-first century, Aziraphale!”

Finally, he looked back at him. Crowley saw his expression. He frowned and sputtered out a laugh at the same time. Aziraphale lost his straight face, too.

“_Aziraphale_.”

“Sorry, my dear. I couldn’t resist.”

“You cheeky—” Crowley didn’t finish, just shaking his head, and the two of them walked off down the side of the pond, careful to avoid the ducks as they went.

“We could always go to the beach,” Crowley said after a while. “Nice water, probably. And you could look for shells.”

“Hmm.” Aziraphale wondered how Crowley had known he’d like shells. It wasn’t as though he had collected any. He hardly ever made it to any beaches these days, but if he were there, collecting shells was something he was sure he’d enjoy. But he had never mentioned it to Crowley.

“We’d have to get you a new suit,” Crowley was saying. “Whatever you have, I’m sure it’s at least a century old, and I am _not_ going to be seen with you wearing anything that has stripes up to your neck. And you’ll just have to bare your ankles like the rest of us.”

When _had_ he last been to the beach? And had he been with Crowley, ever? To the ocean, perhaps, eons ago when they’d had to take ships to travel from one place to the next. Not that that counted as a beach visit.

Crowley glanced at him out of the corner of his eye. “Do you even have sandals?”

“Probably,” Aziraphale said. He never much got rid of anything in his life. He was sure there was probably an array of footwear stashed deep within his closet somewhere. In fact, he was expecting Crowley to tease him for this very fact, but instead the demon simply looked astonished.

“Well, I’ll be,” he said.

They reached a bench, which wasn’t free, until Crowley glared at it for a moment, and the young couple who had been sitting there felt the sudden urge to get up and go somewhere else. Crowley led Aziraphale to it, and they sat, one on one end, the other at the other, a little ways apart, but not enough space for a person or any sort of antagonism to sit between them. Just enough room for a little bit of plausible deniability. The arm rest dug into Aziraphale’s side.

Meanwhile, Crowley used it as it simply was, an armrest, and sat like he hadn’t a care in the world. Aziraphale envied him. Or, no—he wouldn’t take it away from him, he only wished he could feel the same. Or was that jealousy? He could never keep them apart. It probably wasn’t a good sign, for an angel, but then again it was really the English words and not the sins themselves that tripped him up.

Crowley was watching something in the distance. His brow was slightly creased, and his mouth stretched a bit as he faced the sun, even with his dark glasses. Aziraphale couldn’t help staring, as if he could read his mind that way. He didn’t normally give much notice to what other people might be thinking. Questioning things was just a side-effect that came with hanging around Crowley, like a habit. A bonus. Like developing a need for food.

Crowley caught him.

Aziraphale coughed and turned away, but Crowley had already seen. He got that tentative half-smile that he sometimes wore. Like the one he put on when he’d tempted a human to lose their temper, the angel thought with a tiny scowl as he turned even further away.

No, not like that one. Amusement and a little bit of smugness, maybe, but no wicked edge like that one sometimes had. This one only had hope.

Oh, dear.

Aziraphale mentioned something about it starting to get cold, and Crowley, too knowingly, agreed, and they started to head out. A whole day of doing nothing. Aziraphale wondered how humans could bear to spend a whole day mulling around in parks when they knew their days were limited. He wondered if he could bear to go without it. And perhaps they were the same.

They wandered towards the park’s exit until their wandering reached the point where they would either have to split, or one of them would be ‘accompanying’ the other in his direction, and Aziraphale made a decision. He couldn’t be ambiguous. Aziraphale read books, and Crowley read between lines. He needed to make things clear.

The truth was, that would require him doing things he would never be able to do, such as seeing him less, or saying things more, and he could never do either of those. Since when had he been so _weak?_

So he told Crowley with a cheerful voice that he would walk home, and they needn’t take a taxi, and they might as well say goodbye now, as there was no need for Crowley to wear himself out by walking all the way with him, and so they said goodbye, as though it didn’t hurt either of them.

Aziraphale walked home alone.

He needed to pay more attention.

Crowley kept catching him looking. When had that all flipped around? It used to be Crowley who had to avoid being caught staring. Luckily, because Crowley _had_ been doing that for so long, Aziraphale knew exactly which cover-ups were the most effective. Look away too quickly, and you would seem suspicious. If you looked away too slowly, it might seem like you were turning away in disgust or anger. How many times had he thought Crowley was staring at him in disapproval, then turning his gaze to the table or out the window because he just couldn’t bear to look at him anymore? Maybe sometimes he had been right. How many times had he been wrong?

Either way, as much as Aziraphale didn’t want Crowley to think _one_ thing, he didn’t want him to think that he was angry with him, either. The best thing to do was to keep eye contact and start speaking, about something, anything, as though you had been lost in thought and that was all. Crowley had perfected that one, and Aziraphale knew how well it worked. He remembered, so many times, he had noticed the demon had been looking at him for a long time, an odd expression on his face—then when Aziraphale turned to him, Crowley would say something like ‘I’ve been thinking, d’you feel like sushi tonight?’ and Aziraphale would let out a breath of relief and say that, yes, he did, and he would be so glad that dinner had been all that was on the demon’s mind.

He felt a touch of sickly guilt that he had been that—_relieved_. He had been so relieved by those lies.

Now he knew the truth.

And he ought to be relieved, then, if Crowley bought it—when Aziraphale had been staring, surprising even himself when the demon caught his eye and tilted his head a little, questioning, which was a much more daring thing to do than either of them had ever done before. Crowley had always asked the questions, just not like _this_. When Aziraphale quickly stuttered out something about how he had been lost in thought about something else, about something entirely different, not connected to _him_ at all, he should only have been relieved if Crowley had looked relieved, also, and carried on the new conversation without a backward glance. He should feel relieved, even, if Crowley looked a little disappointed. A little disappointed now was better than whatever would have to come later, after false hope. Aziraphale should certainly feel bothered when Crowley’s actual response was to smile a little, a too-knowing smile, and shake his head. He should feel worried when Crowley said ‘sure, angel’, another daring thing to say.

He shouldn’t feel so relieved by this particular deception failing so utterly miserably.

Maybe it was just a distaste for telling lies, or having them be believed. Surely it was always better if people knew the truth?

But this lie had been for his friend’s own good—and it wasn’t really a lie, either, was it? He hadn’t been staring like _that_. It was almost wicked of him to be pleased by the idea that Crowley would read such a thing into it. Whatever kind of game he was playing, he needed to stop. Crowley was not a game. Crowley was—

Crowley was a box of matches. Always had been. A box of matches that could be struck on just about anything. One little idea gets into his head, and it spreads like flames. Always ready to ignite.

It was a good thing Aziraphale was such a damper.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I also turn into a bastard when one of my friends suggests bowling. I am sorry.


	3. Chapter 3

Crowley wondered what he would do if he’d been bound by the human perception of a ‘normal’ life.

For one thing, he was a demon. Not being bound by things was, well, kind of his _thing_. In an odd sort of paradoxical way. And then, of course, there was the fact that really, he was bound by Hell, and that was perhaps one of the less pleasant things to be bound by, but, well, what could you do….

And he had been bound by the great big Ineffable Plan. Except he had broken out of that one. He and Aziraphale. He and Aziraphale—_oh, Someone_.

Not able to think of that right now, he dragged his train of thought back to the ‘normal’ human life, which, for a _second_ thing, wasn’t really a thing and did indeed change drastically depending on who you were, where you were, what time you were living, et cetera et cetera. ‘Normal’ was a setting on a washing machine. Or so they thought. Only, a) it wasn’t, not on any washing machine he’d ever seen, not that he’d seen that many, but still, calling your life ‘light load’ or ‘heavy soil’ might be an apt but still very different thing to say besides ‘normal’; and b) humans didn’t seem to realize how alike all their lives really were. Sure, there were things like getting married, having kids, going from school to career to retirement, things that some people thought were normal and therefore anyone not doing those things was a discrepancy. Getting married may not have been universal after all, so perhaps that was one fewer ‘normal’ thing that people actually did. But developing a close relationship with someone? Someone, whom they picked, to live with or near or close to even over long physical distances? There was that. There was almost always that. Even if it was just friends or family*.

*Imagine that, being born with a _family_.

There was still always a sort of picking-and-choosing part of life that humans did that he—just didn’t get.

Not that he didn’t _get_. Oh, he _got_ it. He just didn’t get to have it.

Because whenever he chose someone, it always felt a little like picking up a bug and putting it in a jar for a bit. And he hated that. He didn’t _want_ to feel that way. He never saw human beings like bugs. But what more could he do than get to know more about them without them ever really knowing him at all? It was like looking on from afar no matter what he tried. And tapping on the glass—he couldn’t help tapping on the glass. It just happened. Being a demon, things that humans couldn’t do just happened around him, and he couldn’t help it, but he couldn’t help them either, he wasn’t allowed, and what kind of friendship could that ever really be?

No messing about, and no helping either. What good could come of that?

And then there was Aziraphale.

He could be himself with Aziraphale. He could have ‘picked’ him without it feeling like there was any sort of unevenness between them. Everything could be known.

If there had been others who knew him, who had been able to know him, would he have still picked _him?_

That was exactly the kind of thought Crowley shied away from, because the thunderous ‘_YES_’s were too overwhelming, and they were the exact kind of knowledge he wished he didn’t need.

But if he’d had to try to live a normal life. Because there were some things that pretty much all humans had to do, like work, and struggle, and find something to fill up their time with. Setting goals and moving forward instead of just sort of—surviving by immortality. What would he do if time was limited? He’d thought about it often. What kind of job would he get? Because he’d have to have one, to get by. Sometimes he’d think things like ‘It might be nice to learn how to cook properly, be a chef’, or ‘I bet I’d be really good at marketing’, but then soon after he’d think…well, not _really_. It wouldn’t really be fun to do anything at all for hours every week, because you _had_ to, and not be able to stop whenever you wanted. Not even something humans called a ‘dream-job’. It was always just better than the alternative, except for him, his alternative could be almost whatever he wanted.

What if he only had a limited time to do all the things he wanted to do?

Those goals they set. The ‘stages’ of life. Crowley had never had a childhood and he’d be damned again if he was going to have an invalid elderly period, but he’d dabbled in pretty much all of the ages in between, and he supposed it just wasn’t the same when you were stuck with one once you’d reached it. If he aged and couldn’t help it—the thought scared him—he supposed he would want to develop some sort of stability. Something to hold onto as the world whirred around him and he was gradually worn away. Someplace to go back to as everything changed. Someone.

Meanwhile, from Crowley’s perspective, life wasn’t like that at all. Because he didn’t have to worry about things _ending_—no, he had to worry about them going on too long, because he could, if he wanted to, just keep things the same forever and ever. From that respect, the terrifying mortality of human nature seemed to have a silver lining, because at least it meant you were going somewhere. Least it meant you’d set yourself things to aim for.

What would he aim for, if he had to come down somewhere eventually?

It probably wasn’t the ‘get a house with a garden’ thing so many people seemed to focus on as their end goal. He’d had houses. And flats, plenty of them, all different sizes and shapes. They were nice, but in the end, it didn’t matter what kind of building he put himself in once he’d finished whatever business he’d had during the day*.

*And, usually, a significant part of the night.

Let’s face it. He’d end up at the angel’s flat half the time, anyway.

No, he spent too much time out and about to worry as much about what ‘home’ looked like. And the ‘career’ thing wasn’t really his jam either. The whole ‘raising a family’ idea made him a whole different kind of uncomfortable that he preferred not to think about. Travel? Been there, done that, although he could always do more, but it was kind of inevitable when your jurisdiction for the equivalent of your ‘job’ was the whole entire Earth anyway. Creating something artistic? Didn’t have the patience. Acquiring fame? Notoriety didn’t seem worth the trouble; he’d prefer to have people instantly think he was someone worth knowing upon meeting him, just by the impression he gave, and then to leave him alone for the rest of his life from the moment he left. Fortune would be nice, he supposed, if he couldn’t summon it by will, and he probably would spend much of his poor mortal life chasing after money if he had to, just so he could keep the comforts and trinkets he was used to having.

Some humans liked to ‘make a difference’ with their lives. Something to affect others. Or, _help_ others, really, which was not the same as ‘making a difference’, because he had done _that_ for millennia and it was not in the way most humans meant it. Some people set ‘helping people’ as their number one goal in their lives.

_ Well, I’ve helped save the whole bloody world_, he thought petulantly, just to avoid the fact that he still felt a bit uncomfortable when he considered being a person one might describe as ‘helpful’ instead of ‘evil demon’, _so that should be good enough_.

He supposed he didn’t have to help _people_, though. He wouldn’t have to dedicate his life to the exact opposite of what most of his existence had been aimed towards for eons. It could be the environment, or something. He could plant some trees. Try to save an endangered species. Cleaning up polluted waters might be a bit too much of an insult to his semi-colleague, Chalky, but rebuilding habitats for gorillas surely wouldn’t be stepping on White’s toes too much. That might be nice. Saving the environment.

As soon as he’d had that thought, once he’d come up with some idea of ‘what he’d do’ with a limited life if he’d had one, he realized it.

He knew what this whole rambling train of thought had been for.

Because he didn’t _care_ what he’d do. All those questions had just been an excuse for finally asking the real one. What would he do? What would _he really do?_ If he had a short, miniscule life, death coming closer by the second, and there was only so much he could accomplish before it was over, he was finished, through, only so much he could _save?_ What would he _make sure he saved_ before it was too late, and the possibility was lost forever?

He’d make blessed sure he didn’t lose Aziraphale.

He didn’t want to lose one moment with him, even now, when they supposedly had so many.

Which he supposed was why he bought the stupid ring.

Or, not really. Because as he’d said, he didn’t want to get _married_. Sure, if they were _human_, it might be different. If they had time chasing after their tails, and he for some reason needed that stability, an answer, now, a promise. But he didn’t. They had forever. He needed to fill forever. There was always another day. The last thing he needed was certainty.

It didn’t feel like it.

Maybe he’d just gotten the ring because with all their non-peopleness, there were certain things they could never do, because it was as if they were for people only. It was so frustrating. He wanted to rebel from it. He wanted to _have it_. He couldn’t have it, so he wanted to break it.

It was just a little round piece of metal.

In the end, Crowley decided to keep it, because there had never really been an option of giving it to him, not really. Aziraphale read books. Books about people, century after century. Rings had meant something for far too long. The angel knew what things _meant_.

Could something really mean something if you didn’t mean to mean it? Did they still mean something if you meant it silently, only to yourself?

Just a round piece of metal, symbolizing eternity or whatever, but really it was about _glitz_, wasn’t it, a shiny little thing to put on your finger, it was about _looks_ and _glamour_ and owning things, it was about indulgence and if anything fit the angel, it would be a tiny little shining piece of indulgence both hidden and on display all at once on his hand.

_Do you understand_, Crowley thought, to no one, _what it’s like to see something and to know that someone will like it, beyond any sliver of a doubt? That doesn’t just _happen. It’s ineffable. He had to buy it. _Do you _understand_ what that’s _like_?_

It felt like something demons didn’t get very often, nor did anyone else immortal. It felt like once in a lifetime.

The trouble was giving it to him.

_It’s just a gift_, a voice that could no longer be called ‘rationality’ and now had to be renamed ‘delusion’ screamed in Crowley’s head. _It’s not a bloody request, it’s only a gift_.

Giving gifts had always been difficult. Not because of the demon thing, none of that. It was just that Crowley was always paranoid that Aziraphale would wonder _why_. They didn’t have the excuse of birthdays. Calling anything an ‘anniversary’ would carry _implications_. Or maybe they wouldn’t. Aziraphale gave him gifts all time. Well, not all the time, and not _gifts_, so much as things he saw that he thought Crowley would like, or ought to have, which was why he owned far too many hats with ear flaps, in his opinion. Question it, and the angel would practically scold you for it. And he never did question it when Crowley had given him things in the past. Aziraphale defended his own version of ‘acceptable’ with a staunchness that would have made the force of gravity seem weak, and if you gave him something he really wanted, he usually decided it was acceptable pretty quickly.

But maybe not now.

Crowley still didn’t know if he _knew_. He still wasn’t sure if things had changed, or only in his mind. He’d been paranoid before, loads of times. He’d been hopeful before.

He carried the box around with him as a sort of test. Testing if he’d give it to him. Testing if he’d accept it when he did.

If he did.

It turned out that Aziraphale, possessed by some sort of force that clearly couldn’t have been demonic but was still a right blighter, in Crowley’s opinion, ended up fishing the blessed thing out of Crowley’s coat pocket while he was in the bookshop kitchenette getting them some wine glasses.

Crowley came back into the room, one arm up with the stems of both glasses clasped in his hand, and it was a wonder he didn’t drop them.

His jaw didn’t drop either. Gravity, indeed. His face felt numb.

Aziraphale was holding the little velvety box as though it were a small living creature. He looked up at Crowley wordlessly.

“What were you doing in my coat?” Crowley asked. His voice betrayed nothing.

“It clunked,” Aziraphale said simply. “When I took it from you, and went to hang it on the coat rack.”

“And you investigated the clunk,” Crowley said.

“Clunked like anything.” Aziraphale popped the box open. Crowley felt the dream-numbness of not being able to move, to stop him. The angel looked at the ring, then back at Crowley. He gave a nervous little laugh. “I’m not even sure I want to know what sort of mischief you were going to cause with this.”

“S’not for that.”

Aziraphale stared at him.

Crowley set the glasses down on the table. He walked over to the angel and took the box from him. Aziraphale let him.

And Crowley imagined. What would happen if he were to take it from him, get down on one knee, for whatever reason they do that, and then he knew he would only be able to stare up at him, silent and blank. And Aziraphale would understand. He would know. And he would say, ‘Oh,’ and that one syllable, the most terrifying thing Aziraphale could say, because he could always put so much _meaning_ into meaningless syllables, so much emotion, and anyone including himself who ever thought the angel wasn’t very emotionally expressive was forgetting about his damned interjections, where he’d say ‘oh’ or ‘ah’ or ‘I _see’_ and that one little exclamation would be dripping with disdain, or amusement, or doubt, or pride, or smugness, or worry, or sympathy, or anger, or utter unconcern, which for Aziraphale could be transformed from emotionlessness to the most powerful emotion of all.

And it was this thought that made him snap the case shut. Instead of getting down on one knee, he turned to the side, and said, a little peevishly, “I just _liked_ it, angel. I saw it in a display and it was shiny and I thought I’d like to have it. It doesn’t always have to be about marriage, or whatever _humans_ think things are for, you know.”

“Nno,” Aziraphale said. Crowley cursed him for the way he drew the word out, with his eyebrows pulled together like that, and cursed himself for trying to read into it. The angel said, “I suppose not.”

“It’s not like _we_ have anything to do with that,” Crowley snapped. In his panic and utterly unhelpful defensive reaction of doing exactly what he _didn’t_ want, he’d meant ‘we’ to be an isolating term, to pull them apart from the rest of the world that he so much wanted to be a part of. But instead it had just stuck the two of them together, so he backed out of it as fast as he could. “I mean, it’s not like you or _I_ have to go along with the way _humans_ see the world. We can just take what we want from it, and ignore all the stupid little ceremonies and rules. I wanted a ring, so I bought one.”

“Uh-huh,” Aziraphale said.

“’S’not like I need someone to buy one for me,” Crowley grumbled. His self-awareness was acting up again. He really needed to get that checked out. He felt like an ass. Then, nearly giving both himself and Aziraphale emotional whiplash, he said, “Do you want it?”

They stared at each other. The room stared back at them like an expectant audience. Crowley had to control every muscle in his face to keep from wincing.

“What?” Aziraphale said.

“I mean,” Crowley said, “if you like it. It seems like the sort of thing you’d like. I saw it and thought I might like to have it but I don’t _need_ it, so if you want it, you—could—”

“You saw this in a window and you wanted it,” Aziraphale said, “but now you’re asking if—_I_ want it?”

“I could always just go and get myself another one,” Crowley said. His face grew hot. “Er, not that we’d be match—look, I’m just saying, these things don’t matter, we don’t need to get caught up in the way humans look at things, we’re not _like_ them.”

“Pardon me for a moment,” Aziraphale said, sparing Crowley the task of trying to think of an even _worse_ thing to say. “If you just wanted this ring for yourself, why did you get the fancy box?”

Crowley felt the royal blue velvet box in his hand burning a hole through his palm. “It came with it. Things just come in little boxes. That’s how it is in this world.” You like a thing, it comes in a box. Things, feelings….

“Well,” Aziraphale said thoughtfully. “At least it’s a _nice_ little box.”

Crowley ground his teeth together. His shoulders tensed. His back hurt and he felt like an idiot*.

*Two things that, ironically, connected him to a large part of the human experience that he so much felt he was missing out on.

Aziraphale was still staring at him. Crowley said, “I’m going home.”

He put the box on the table. 

And he left.

Luckily for Crowley, once he’d left after having said exactly the opposite of what he had meant and wanted to say, Aziraphale was stuck contemplating exactly the opposite of what he had said after all. Aziraphale had done this for ages. It was probably a consequence of the invention—and Crowley’s adoption—of sarcasm.

_ ‘Oh, sure, Aziraphale. Whatever you think is right _must_ be._

_ I’m sure it’s the epitome of morality for an angel such as yourself _not_ to think too much about things.’_

So Aziraphale was left thinking about little boxes.

If there was one thing the demon loved, it was symbols. Funnily enough, he probably thought he hated them. Crowley went around glowering at things like religious symbols and people using stories from the Bible to justify their actions and slapping the icon of something that represented peace on things to make yourself look like you were always working for a good cause, even if you weren’t. He mocked clichés in movies, the bird symbolizing freedom, the locket symbolizing somebody’s heart. But he also loved clichés. And he was always speaking in analogies, with those turns of phrase he would pick up from whatever decade they were living in. _The bottom line_. _The end of the road. The bee’s knees_. It had been a while since he’d said that one. Aziraphale hoped it wasn’t because of the way he had looked at him when he’d said it the first time. Sometimes he thought he had rather too much of an effect on the poor demon.

Aziraphale came across symbolism all the time. Hardly a writer could be found who didn’t rely on it, and the ones who didn’t, he found with frustration, were somehow boring. He felt this way even though symbolism drove him mad, the way they would compare a thing to something else and expect him to pick up on it right away, even though there were so many differences, so many incongruences in their analogies that made them not make sense. If it was the end of the road, then you could just get out and walk. If a bird was flying across space, it would need a spaceship. Things were either too complicated or too simplistic. People would find one similarity between two things and then act as though they should react in exactly the same way to every circumstance. It was exhausting.

People should just say what they meant. Not that he had ever much done that, but, well—he didn’t really mean things very often. It wasn’t that he said what he didn’t feel, but he didn’t have anything he felt that he needed people to understand he _meant_. He didn’t have much _to_ say. Other than facts, which everyone either knew or didn’t want to be reminded about, there wasn’t much inside of him that he felt the need to let out. But some people, like Crowley, were constantly churning out new thoughts and emotions, and they were always needing to explain them somehow, for some reason, as though they would burst if they didn’t. Everything they said had meaning. So why did they have to couch it in symbols?

Everything comes in a little box.

Aziraphale looked at the little box. Crowley had left it behind. It had been sitting on his table. Burning a hole right through it.

Aziraphale laid his hand on top of it, casually, as though he hadn’t even noticed it were there. Then his hand adjusted itself around it, breaking the illusion. He curved his fingers around the top edge. His index finger felt the cool metal of the clasp that held it shut. He rubbed his thumb across the soft velvet of its side.

He opened it.


	4. Chapter 4

They were having dinner at Crowley’s flat.

This didn’t happen very often. Never, in fact, unless they were watching a movie, in which case they would be sitting on the sofa eating takeaway. Not in his kitchen. Not something Crowley had made himself.

At least there weren’t candles.

Crowley had told him that he’d wanted to try out cooking. The kitchen, admittedly, looked a mess. The demon’s table was stuck in the corner, the chairs were hard and uncomfortable, and the lights, as in all of his flat, were garishly bright to match the white walls and floors and ‘modern’ look of the whole thing. It was a far stretch from warm. The ambience was the farthest thing from alarming. Still, the _situation_—

Aziraphale stopped himself. He’d had enough of analyzing everything. He had said yes, he’d come over. He would try his friend’s food. He just wanted to leave well enough alone.

“Thanks for coming,” Crowley said as he approached with two plates in hand. He looked nervous. “I—uh—I made spaghetti.”

“Yum,” Aziraphale said, uncharacteristically and awkwardly. He meant it to be supportive. Crowley seemed to understand.

“And garlic bread. Which is—oh, _crap_.”

He hurried off, still carrying the plates. He hurried back and put the plates down. He hurried off again and finally returned, slowly this time, with the garlic bread, which miraculously* did not look burnt.

*Aziraphale hadn’t interfered—he would never dare.

“Sorry,” Crowley said with a breathy laugh. He set the garlic bread down. He stood there, staring at the table, as though trying to remember every single step that went into eating a meal.

“And I brought wine,” Aziraphale said in as soothing of a voice as he could muster.

Crowley grinned. “I didn’t forget that, actually. But, well. Yours is probably better anyway. Always is.”

He finally sat down, looking the least relaxed Aziraphale had seen him in ages.

“It looks delicious, my dear,” the angel said.

“It’s supposed to _smell_ delicious, I think.”

“That too.”

Crowley gave him a smile that set off a little reaction in him, a taunting little feeling that only served to make him regret the absence of what he could feel if he only had the heart for more. Aziraphale smiled back as best as he could.

“Really,” Crowley said. “Thanks for being my guinea pig.”

“Your _what?_”

“Relax, angel. It’s a saying. Anyway, I just sort of—added things to a premade sauce. So it’s not like I could poison you too badly. Eheh.”

“Well, thank _goodness_.”

They ate in silence for a while. Aziraphale kept wanting to compliment Crowley’s cooking, to assure him he’d done a fine job, but whenever he mentioned it the demon waved a hand and grunted. He kept mumbling about only having added some spices. Aziraphale said something about not even knowing which spices were which. It wasn’t true. Back in the day, meaning _millennia_ ago, spices had been about all they’d had, and he had never forgotten their names. _All_ of their names. One of the things that stuck, when so much else was lost.

They sat at the table and ate and didn’t say a word. It felt so _public_, somehow, sitting here with him. They weren’t where they belonged. Somehow, _their_ own spaces were the little public places they’d cornered for themselves, at the Ritz and in other small restaurants where the waiters knew them but nobody else seemed to pay them any mind. They could talk about anything there, humans milling around without knowing a thing about who they were. Here, it was just the two of them, and it was like they were being watched. Perhaps it was because they were being examined so closely by Aziraphale, himself. And the walls were too white. The lights were too bright. The whole flat was too bare, there was no music playing, and there weren’t any candles which somehow would have made things feel more normal in spite of all of the angel’s misgivings.

After a while, Aziraphale huffed and rested his elbow on the table. “This lighting is simply _atrocious_,” he said. He waved his hand and the room dimmed, became warmer, their faces less stark in the night.

Crowley raised an eyebrow at him.

Aziraphale blushed. “I’m sorry, dear boy,” he said, too quickly. “I don’t know how you live like this.”

Crowley was still staring.

Aziraphale scoffed. “Don’t take it like that,” he said, in a low voice. He turned away from Crowley and found himself staring awkwardly at a wall.

“Take what like—what?” Crowley said innocently.

“I’m sure I don’t know what you mean.”

“Nicer _ambience_ this way,” Crowley said.

Aziraphale turned back to him and glared. Crowley shrugged. Aziraphale realized he had lost his cool. He tried to relax his face. He twirled spaghetti around his fork. It all came undone. “Anyway, no wonder you have to wear those glasses all the time. Even in your own home. Nearly being blinded at all hours of the night.”

“This isn’t exactly my—”

When Crowley paused, Aziraphale made the mistake of looking up at him again. The change in lighting really did make his face look softer. How cruel it was to feel the shadow of a feeling you knew wasn’t yours.

“Well now it’s too dark,” Crowley snapped.

Aziraphale was startled. “Well, then,” he said snippily, “why don’t you take them off?”

“What?”

“Take them _off_.”

“You want me to take my glasses off?”

“I—” Aziraphale sighed in frustration. “I want you to—to stop being so dramatic about everything, and to just—look, just take them off once in a while, all right? It’s not as though _I_ don’t know you’re a demon. I don’t see why you feel the need to go burning through every light bulb in the city in the privacy of your own home just to—”

Crowley took his glasses off.

Aziraphale stared.

Crowley, who had truthfully only slid his glasses partway down his nose, stared at him over their rim and raised his eyebrows once again.

Aziraphale opened and closed his mouth.

Crowley sighed and slid the glasses back up over his eyes, then stuffed a rather large piece of garlic bread into his mouth, trying, most likely, to ruin the moment, but failing even at that, because Aziraphale had forgotten that precise shade of yellow, and it was staying with him like the after-effect of a camera flash.

They waited for Crowley to finish chewing.

Eventually, the angel grew impatient. “You could have left them off.”

Crowley swallowed, wincing, then glared at him. “You sure I didn’t make you _uncomfortable_?”

“Don’t be ridiculous.” Aziraphale could feel the whole evening getting rapidly out of hand. He wasn’t sure if this was turning into a _fight_, or something worse. He wasn’t sure it would be worse. _Shadows of feelings_, he thought. _Wanting to feel something isn’t the same_. He didn’t trust himself.

“Ridiculous?” Crowley said. “It’s always the same whenever I do. You stop and stare at me like—like I’ve got bug-eyes, or something. Well, I guess snake-eyes aren’t exactly the—”

“I do _not_ stare at you like you have bug-eyes,” Aziraphale snapped. “I’m only—it’s only because it’s different. That’s all.”

“But it’s _me_—”

“That’s what I mean. Not different from other people. Different from you.”

Crowley didn’t reply. He chewed on his lip, head angled slightly away from Aziraphale, shoulders tensed. He looked down at his plate and grabbed his fork. He looked, again, as though he were trying to remember how eating was supposed to go.

Aziraphale sighed. He reached across the table and grabbed Crowley’s hand in his own. “I’m sorry,” he said, softly. “I’m sorry. Take your glasses off if you like. I really don’t mind. Your eyes are perfectly, _perfectly_ fine. I really mean that.”

Crowley didn’t say anything.

“They’re charming,” Aziraphale said. “They’re _you_. They’re—” He couldn’t say any more. There were no other words that wouldn’t sound like they meant—something else. How terribly cruel.

Crowley looked down at their hands. He looked up at Aziraphale’s face. He looked, even through the distance the glasses still gave them—he looked hopeful.

Aziraphale pulled back his hand.

It was like a reflex. He would have said, _I’m sorry. I’m so sorry_. But saying that would have been admitting to there being something to be sorry about. He couldn’t even admit that it was there. _This_ was why. That look of hope on his face. This was what he always tried to avoid, and he always failed.

There was a clang as Crowley dropped his fork. Aziraphale looked up, alarmed, but Crowley didn’t look angry, as he’d feared. He had a soldiering-on look about him.

“I—I really am—” Aziraphale began, figuring he might as well now anyway.

Crowley just shook his head. “What are you so afraid of?” he said, hushed, a small smile playing around his sad face, as he looked down at the table and fidgeted with his hands.

_ ‘I’m afraid of change.’_ It seemed an ill-fitting thing to say, because being afraid of change was like being afraid of Crowley himself. And Aziraphale had never really been afraid of Crowley.

_ Why are you so afraid of change?_ Crowley had asked him, at some point in their past, probably multiple times. It was the kind of question that could only ever be asked in a teasing manner, only when they had let their guard down but weren’t really taking anything the other said seriously—not that that meant they were being untruthful. _Why are you always so afraid of change?_

_ Because I’ve lost so much_, Aziraphale thought, in the whisper of a scream your thoughts could do. _Haven’t you?_

“Oh, Crowley,” Aziraphale mumbled, picking up his fork and pushing things around uselessly on his plate, trying to recapture that tone of nonchalance he so often used, trying to hide behind the moments of mundanity that they always blessedly had to talk about things that they could never say with focus and sincerity. “You know I’m always afraid of change.” He tried to sound just self-deprecating and also disapproving enough to let it slide without notice. But he also desperately wanted Crowley to ask him, this time, _why?_ Because this time he would answer, and he would be able to ask him his own question.

But Crowley didn’t. After a moment Aziraphale looked up at him. The demon was looking at him with his head tilted a bit to the side, his expression wistful and sympathetic. _Which I suppose is answer enough_, he thought.

Then Crowley said, “I guess.” He gave a little shudder and shifted his position. “I guess—it just wouldn’t feel like that to me. Not ‘change’.” He picked up a fork and started playing with his food, mirroring the angel. “Because I’ve already been there.”

Aziraphale’s mind buzzed with bewilderment about what that could have meant, but he pushed it to the side. Waited for Crowley to say something else. Change the subject, and his tone. To set them free from the ledge they had been pushed closer and closer towards, as he always did.

Crowley didn’t.

Aziraphale’s mind went blank anyway. It was like a habit. He wasn’t trained to keep thinking about these things, after years of being mercifully interrupted.

_Have you ever really?_ he thought. Crowley looked up at him. Aziraphale held his breath, held out one last hope.

The demon smiled.

That was not an interruption. It was not a change in the subject.

It was still a diversion that was hard to come back from.

Aziraphale grasped for words like they were a life preserver. “This—is very—good—garlic bread.”

Crowley’s grin didn’t fade, but it became less tentative, more casual, more real, in an amused, honest way. “The _garlic bread_,” he said, “was frozen.”

“It’s—not frozen—anymore.”

Crowley laughed. Usually, that made things all seem okay. Tonight the spell lasted. The laugh made it worse. Aziraphale tried to snap out of it. Tried to look at him like he was normal.

“Sticking it in the oven will do that,” Crowley said. He smirked at the dithering angel. “Do I need to do that with you?”

This was Aziraphale’s turn. This was where he was supposed to recover himself by snapping out some indignant response. That would set them back on track.

Aziraphale didn’t.

_ Already been _where? his mind reeled at him, over and over. They’d finished the food and he’d gone home and his brain had started again, only to get stuck in a rut. If he’d been the type to need sleep, he would have given up on tonight by now, anyway. He knew what the demon was talking about. Why did he need him to say it? _It wouldn’t feel like a change._ Not to Crowley.

But they hadn’t—they _weren’t_. They hadn’t _done_ anything. Not that love had to be about _doing_ things, but then if it wasn’t, what did Crowley _want?_ To want something implied wanting change by its very nature. Then Aziraphale thought, _maybe what Crowley means is, that he already _feels_ that way, and he just wants the circumstances to change_. And then he thought, angrily, _Crowley doesn’t understand. That’s exactly what I mean. He wants to change the way we _are.

The way they were—was the most important thing Aziraphale had.

It was going to be a long and stormy night.


	5. Chapter 5

Crowley had meant to wait a week, which was supposed to have been him being generous with himself, and instead he only waited three days. Aziraphale had questioned the ring. He was questioning things. There had to be some reason for that. It was like a crack, a crack in a wall, but if he wasn’t careful it could end up being a crack in the ground and they could both end up on different sides.

He called him.

He held the phone next to the side of his face. It had never felt so warm. It emitted the fake ring it used to pretend to be Aziraphale’s phone ringing on the other end, pretending he could hear it, that they weren’t separated by so much distance. Aziraphale answered, a ‘Good evening?’ coming from far away, and Crowley almost forgot that that wasn’t pretend, too.

“Um.”

“Er—hello? This is Mr. Fell—”

“Aziraphale.”

“Hello, Crowley,” the voice breathed. Aziraphale sounded relieved.

_Don’t you ever get tired of that?_ Crowley thought. _Always just_ relief. “Listen,” he said.

“Yes?”

“Well.” Crowley twirled the phone’s cord around his hand. He tried to sound like he was smirking. “You—you really shouldn’t answer the phone with ‘Good evening’ and _giving out your name._ It’s only telemarketers this hour, and hearing them mispronounce your name is one of the ways you can tell it’s—”

“_Dear boy_,” Aziraphale cut him off. “Is there a reason you’re calling me at this hour?”

_I would have called earlier, but I thought it was too late already_. Now here he was, calling him anyway. Crowley said, a little irritated, “Does there have to be a reason?”

There was a pause, then Aziraphale trying to sound chipper. “No. In fact, there doesn’t have to be a reason at all. That’s one of the nice things, that between friends, there doesn’t have to—”

“Look.” Crowley rubbed his temples. “Why don’t we get drunk?”

There was the sound of the phone being moved from one ear to the other. “I don’t think that’s a very good idea.”

“Getting drunk lessens your judgment, Aziraphale, it doesn’t change what you want.”

“Exactly,” the angel said sternly. “How will that help?”

Crowley frowned at the wall. He breathed in slow. “Fine,” he said. “Let’s get mind-bogglingly sober and sit in the dark and think about the universe while our brains are drier than they’ve ever been. Let’s do _something_. Let’s see how bored we can possibly get. Just—just something, angel.” He didn’t even know what he wanted. Something. Everything. That was the whole entire _point_.

Aziraphale sighed, and then, miraculously, he sounded amused. His old amused, slightly-disapproving self, like nothing had happened. “Why don’t you just come over?”

“Really?”

“Of course, Crowley. Honestly, so dramatic. I don’t know what’s gotten into you these days. Perhaps it’s time you tried out for a play.”

Crowley chewed on his lip and considered the ups and the downs of hanging out with someone who was one-hundred-percent denying half of your very existence around him, to the point, apparently, of even pretending that horribly awkward moments hadn’t nearly ruined the last time they had seen each other, but then an idea formed and he smirked. He couldn’t help himself, so he said, “Join the Globe, you mean?”

“_Not_ Shakespeare!”

That did it. He sounded so indignant, it was like talking to a parrot over the phone. He had him laughing, _always_. “I’ll be right over.”

Aziraphale welcomed him at the door and took him in and sat him down at the table, _their_ table, in the back room, and fetched him a cup of tea, and sat down across from him and looked at him patiently, and Crowley realized that the reason he had called him first instead of just sauntering in as he had used to do was because it was like Aziraphale was _inviting_ him this way, if he could get him to say it, and he wanted, _someone_, he _wanted_ Aziraphale to take him in, so badly.

It felt a bit like cheating. But, then, he was a demon. Not that this was what he was meant to use his cheating for.

“Well?” Aziraphale said, elbows on the table and hands steepled in front of him. “Any thoughts on how we can be ‘the most boring we can be’?”

“Not boring,” Crowley corrected. They were never boring. “Bored. I said ‘Let’s get as bored as we can be.’”

“_Hm_-mm,” Aziraphale hummed. He wore a small smile. “It doesn’t seem to be working.”

“No?”

“Mm. I think I’m far too interested in what sort of boring things you’re going to come up with.”

Crowley rested his chin in one hand and rapped the fingers of the other across the table. “Hmm. Did you know some birds build nests in holes in trees that they surround with toxic sap to keep other animals out?”

“_Crowley_.” Aziraphale crossed his arms. “Now, that’s positively fascinating, and you know it.”

Crowley snickered. He laid both his arms on the table and leaned forward, looking up at Aziraphale above his glasses, and said, a little pleadingly, “I don’t know what to _do_, angel. What should we do?”

“You’re the one who wanted to do something,” Aziraphale said, without any rancor. “What are you in the mood for? I’m afraid not much will be open now. Do you want to take a walk? Read—read a book? No.”

Crowley half grinned and half winced as the angel went through a rather pathetic list of suggestions. He watched him in the admittedly much nicer lighting of his home, although it was a bit too dark, and in fact he surreptitiously took his glasses off, and Aziraphale, to his credit, must have noticed, but went on talking as though nothing had changed. Crowley wanted to lay his upper half across the table and rest his face against the crook of his arm. He propped up the side of his face with his fist to keep himself from sinking that far. He wanted to fall asleep in the angel’s eye-contact. He wanted to jump up and run, to _escape_. He wanted to move. He wanted this to be his home and he wanted to run and run and escape from the fact that it was not.

_Run away with me_, he thought, looking into Aziraphale’s eyes. That was something else people would say. And he didn’t even know what he wanted to run away from, because the truth was he loved this life they had, these little meetings in these little rooms, but the truth was he could never admit the truth, and maybe that was it.

Aziraphale had run out of ideas. He had been staring quietly at Crowley for a moment now. Neither of them seemed to have noticed.

_This_ _is it_, Crowley thought. Aziraphale closed his eyes. He slowly sat up in his chair, straightening out his back, his hands on his thighs, more tense than they usually were. He looked so sad. Crowley should have felt guilty. He felt guilty for not feeling guilty. _I’m so very selfish_.

“Why,” Crowley said, “don’t we just talk?”

Aziraphale opened his eyes and smiled at him. “Always, my dear.”

Aziraphale had been vanishing his tea. He felt too full to drink it, and so he vanished it, slowly, watching it swirl in his cup as though there were a drain at the bottom.

“What would you do,” Crowley asked. He sounded sleepy. “What would you do—if you knew you wouldn’t have the chance to do it again?”

“What d’you mean?” Aziraphale asked. His eyes felt too heavy to look up from the swirling tea.

“I mean.” Crowley sat up, stretching himself like a cat. He settled and tilted his head at Aziraphale. “What would you regret not doing?”

“It’s not a good idea,” Aziraphale said quietly. “Doing things so you won’t regret not having done them.”

He looked up and saw the contemplative look on Crowley’s face. “What do you mean?”

“I mean,” the angel said, “that if you only do something because you know now is your only chance, you won’t necessarily enjoy it. I’ve done that too many times. ‘Go to this party, there’s no chance these people will ever be gathered in one room again.’”

“You’ve been to parties?”

“That is exactly my point.” Aziraphale frowned. “You know how you can tell when someone or something is going to go down in history? And so you have to be there? But then you regret it, because it’s not really—how do you put it?—not really your ‘scene’.”

“I remember things going down in history,” Crowley said glumly. “Things you had to be there for. They were a lot worse than parties.”

“Oh. I don’t mean those.” Aziraphale hated to see that haunted look on Crowley’s face, so he went on, trying to give him something he could poke fun at him with. “You know how I don’t enjoy certain sorts of gatherings. But I’ve had friends, over the centuries, who had always told me, ‘You can’t sit around by yourself all day, you’re going to miss out, and you’ll never forgive yourself if you do!’ ‘You have to try this wonderful drink, you’ll really regret missing your chance!’ And it turns out that once you go and do the thing and try the _awful_ drink, it’s only then that you realize, now you have to suffer the consequences, you have a headache and a hangover and an upset stomach and none of it was really worth it because you never really wanted to do any of it, anyway, it was just so you ‘wouldn’t regret it’ later.”

Crowley scratched his chin. “So,” he said. “You got a hangover from the drink?”

“The stomachache was from the drink. The hangover was from the party. Anyway, it’s best just to avoid the whole thing.”

“So then, you’re avoiding doing things because you think it’s more likely you’ll regret doing them than regret _not_ doing them?”

Aziraphale twiddled his thumbs. “Er.”

“So then you’re still living your life based on fear of regret.”

“I suppose.” Aziraphale rolled his eyes. “I suppose I’m not really that different from people, after all. If you _insist_.”

Crowley didn’t taunt him. He had a dreamy look about his eye. His _eyes_. So golden. “They have bucket lists, you know.”

Aziraphale had been distracted. He pulled himself out of his reverie. “What?”

“Things they want to do,” Crowley said. “Before they kick the bucket. Before they’re old and regretting the things they never did. Mortality, for you.”

“Where did that turn of phrase come from?”

“Kick the bucket? I don’t know.”

“I don’t like it,” Aziraphale said, wrinkling his nose and raising his glass to his lips.

“With a disapproval as scathing as always,” Crowley said, only he said it with a grin, and with an expression and voice that was filled to the brim with affection. Aziraphale wondered a bit frantically when he had started to allow him to get away with that.

Aziraphale was a tad frozen. He realized he was trying to drink the absence of tea from his drained cup. The look on Crowley’s face wasn’t fading, exactly, but mellowing. It was as though he were getting used to it. Aziraphale wasn’t, but at least the mellowing made it less like the sun to look at.

“Well?” Crowley said. “What’s on yours?”

“A bucket list?” Aziraphale asked, surprised.

“Mm.”

“I don’t have one,” the angel tutted. He put his cup back down. “I have no need. No buckets I plan to kick. And if I were to die, I hope it’d be with more dignity than kicking anything, especially a defenseless old bucket.”

Crowley snorted, his face still glowing. He said, “I’d like to see the Northern Lights.”

“The aurora borealis?”

Crowley nodded.

“Crowley!” Aziraphale sat up. “You’ve never seen it?”

“Nuh.”

“But they’ve been around _forever_.” He was genuinely surprised. “_We’ve_ been around forever. If you wanted to see it, why didn’t you just go?”

“Too cold,” Crowley said with a shrug. Somehow, that was one of the most wonder-inspiring things he had said all night.

“_Too cold_. Crowley, we’re immortal. You’ve had forever, you know. Just because it’s _too cold_. I mean, really. They’ve invented central heating systems ages ago. You know how to _make a fire_.”

“_You’ve_ been around forever,” Crowley countered. “Doesn’t mean you’ve done everything. That’s just like you, though. Even when we’re talking about forever, you’re only looking at the past. Not the future.”

“Still,” Aziraphale said. He shifted in his seat uncomfortably. “All right. Fine. If you want to look at the future, then consider this—you’re assuming you’ll have forever, so you’re not doing it. It will have been forever eventually, and then you’ll not have done it.”

“You’re talking about regret again.”

“_You’re_ talking about bucket lists.”

Half of Crowley’s mouth turned up in a smile. “All right,” he said. “Maybe I’ll go. Sometime. Anyway, that was my point. Don’t know why we ended up arguing over it. I’m _going_ to go, someday. So that was my turn. What are you going to do?”

Aziraphale sighed. “I don’t know, Crowley. You might not believe this, but honestly, when I want to do something, I usually go ahead and do it.”

“I _don’t_ believe you.”

“That,” Aziraphale said, a bit sharply, “is because you don’t believe people could really _want_ to do small, unobtrusive things that don’t require planning _incredible journeys_ or whatever it is you’re yearning after to obtain.”

Crowley’s slow smile remained, not getting the least bit sharpened by Aziraphale’s tone.

“And what’s more,” the angel said, “just because I’ve never done things _you_ want to do doesn’t mean I don’t do anything. And it doesn’t mean I’m going to end up full of regrets.”

“I didn’t mean you would,” Crowley said.

It had sounded a bit like, ‘I didn’t mean _you_ would.’ Or maybe Aziraphale was just imagining it. He softened. “Anyway,” he said, sounding a bit like a surrender. “I don’t really _want_ to do anything.”

Crowley narrowed his eyes at him speculatively.

The back of Aziraphale’s neck felt hot. “I mean,” he said. “There’s just too much. I get overwhelmed.”

Crowley waited.

“I don’t even try to keep up. Certainly, there might be times when I thought something looked interesting, only to forget about it later—”

Was he smiling? Of course he was smiling.

“Which I suppose—” Aziraphale finished, fully accepting defeat now, “is why they keep lists.”

Crowley was definitely smiling.

Aziraphale tried not to roll his eyes, and ended up, instead, smiling too. “All right,” he said. “What’s next on your list?”

Time passed. The moon, supposedly, moved on across the sky overhead. In the bookshop, blinds drawn and oblivious, the darkness lit up by warm light continued just the same. Crowley went through his list. He added things like ‘swimming with a sea turtle’ and ‘bungee jumping’ and ‘crashing the Oscars’ and all sorts of things that gave Aziraphale a variety of types of mini-heart attacks. It got later. They had started to calm down. Eventually, they were hardly talking at all.

Angel and demon sat across the table from each other.

He kept staring at the bridge of Crowley’s nose—something he didn’t see exposed too often, it being always covered by those glasses of his. _Of course_, came a voice in his head, _that’s not it, it’s his eyes_—but they were far too much to think about, and he pushed the voice aside. He stared instead at the bridge of Crowley’s nose, the gentle curve.

How could he tell him he wanted to trace every line of him? What did that even _mean?_ It was the phrase that came to Aziraphale’s head, the only way with the current language of his mind to describe what he was feeling. If he allowed himself to _want_ when he was looking at him, then what he wanted was to reach out and follow with his fingertip his shape, _who he was_—like he was trying to define him. To figure him out. None of these words were the truth. He’d been alive too long, knew too many languages—they got in his head and tripped him up and wouldn’t let him think of things in any other way.

Maybe that was why Crowley looked at him like _that_. Eyes aglow. Maybe it was an expression he picked up from the humans they’d been around lately—lately meaning the past century or so. Their new way of looking at things, at people, at people-with-people. They made up concepts and then lived by them. Crowley always did catch on faster than Aziraphale did. He may have picked up a new habit that affected the way he felt about his feelings. A nice little box to put them in.

It was so very unlike Crowley, Aziraphale thought suddenly, even though he’d been doing it their whole lives. Finding the humans’ latest box and putting himself into it. This is how humans think _now_. For someone who was aware of how precarious attempts at _defining anything_ could be, he sure could pick up on them quickly.

Meanwhile, Aziraphale didn’t know how to define his feelings at all.

_ Which does not_, he thought quietly, _mean that they are not there_. He simply didn’t know what they were. All this talk of not knowing what he was feeling. How oblivious of him, to not realize that it mattered so much precisely because he was feeling something at all.

It could be a nice box.

Or maybe some boxes were just for presentation, just so you could open them and proudly show what was inside.

He reached out, somehow both impulsive and slow. He moved his hand towards Crowley’s face, and the demon, to his surprise, didn’t move, like a statue but far too warm and with the slight tremble of anyone alive.

Aziraphale touched the bridge of Crowley’s nose. Crowley had closed his eyes, but the angel could feel his eyelids flutter against the tips of his fingers. Then Crowley opened his eyes again and looked up at Aziraphale, past his hand, and the angel felt himself stricken with panic in the _future_, the fear that he had done something that would have dire consequences, but in the moment nothing was vitally wrong and everything was very slow. His fingers curled and he let one of them brush down the side of Crowley’s nose, so slowly, past his eyes that were half closed and staring at him and looking like _that_, like he was setting him on fire, but so much softer.

_ It doesn’t mean anything_, Aziraphale thought. _What you’ve done means nothing. That’s why you could_. It wasn’t a gesture imbued with any meaning or significance. That was why he’d had the nerve to do it. _How very cowardly_.

But Crowley looked like he didn’t buy it. His eyes were _full_ of significance, and something somehow gentle and intense, something Aziraphale recognized too late as pleading. His hand trembled where he was just barely touching his cheek.

And then Crowley breathed in, a deep breath that broke the spell, and Aziraphale took his hand away.

They stared at each other, silently, not meaning anything at all.

Eventually, Crowley went home.


	6. Interlude, between everything, always

Why did Crowley have to leave?

Not as he had that night, in particular, but generally. On a normal basis. Back when they had _been_ normal.

It was rarely Crowley’s choice. But Aziraphale needed, always, for him to go.

When it came down to it, at the end of the night, why did Crowley have to go home instead of stay?

Because then he could come round again. Aziraphale needed him to come round, to stop by unexpected as a pleasant surprise, because then it would be a special treat. It wouldn’t be the horrible feeling of growing tired of each other, of Aziraphale wishing Crowley would go already because morning had come and he had ‘things to do’, not that they had ever really reached that point, but they couldn’t be allowed, because Aziraphale simply couldn’t handle it. Couldn’t feel that heartlessness in himself.

Or, even worse, Crowley would stay, and his presence would cease to matter.

If there was one thing Aziraphale feared, it was his own indifference. Indifference to the suffering of others, to the pleasures of things that would take him away from what he needed to do, whichever direction it faced him. It was necessary, but he needed it. But he feared it. But he never wanted to feel that way about Crowley.

He wasn’t meant for feeling emotions as strongly as he did when Crowley was around, and that certainly could not be sustainable. He certainly wouldn’t be as interesting, as vibrant, as _novel_ a companion as the demon somehow seemed to think he was for much longer than an evening, once in a while, either.

Not sustainable in the least.

And so Crowley couldn’t stay.


	7. Chapter 7

Crowley felt a bit like there were fireworks in his brain. Thoughts kept flashing so brightly he could hardly focus his eyes. It was bad enough that it was dark in here, the crashes of bowling balls hitting pins made of who-knows-what somehow echoing tumultuously even though the floor was carpeted almost everywhere. It was all too much.

Aziraphale let the ball go, and it skittered and hopped a bit on the lane before crashing into the bumper and zigzagging the rest of the way down. It was a wonder it didn’t hit at least one pin, careening all over the place like that.

“Oh—_dear_,” the angel said, putting his fists on his hips and peering into the dark after it worriedly.

“S’allright, angel. That’s what the bumpers are for,” Crowley said.

“It just feels like cheating,” Aziraphale fretted. “Even if I did hit one of the skittles, if it had bounced off the thing first, I’d know deep down that it didn’t count.”

“I didn’t mean they’re to help _you_. I meant they were to stop the ball from injuring a small child after you’d thrown it.”

Aziraphale frowned at him in what could almost be called a pouty sort of way.

Crowley tried not to cackle. “Sorry, angel. Maybe I wouldn’t always say such mean things to you, you know, if—”

“Perhaps I would miss it,” the angel said stolidly. He stared at the lane and gestured for Crowley to take his turn.

Crowley sauntered over to the—the—the whatever it was, the thing that dispensed the monstrous bowling balls. He spent a ridiculous amount of time trying to pick out the one that most matched his aesthetic. There was one that was too large that was black with flames on it, and then there was one that was small and sleek and purple. He couldn’t choose.

“Just pick one, dear boy,” Aziraphale exclaimed. He himself had spent five minutes finding the ball that had holes just the right size for his fingers, ones that wouldn’t disturb his nails, and refused to use any others afterward. He would wait for the mysterious machines to transport the thing all the way back to them, from whatever pit of darkness the things fell into after they’d failed to knock down any pins. The angel added in a sorrowful voice, “I do miss the days when it was played out on the lawn.”

“There’s still lawn skittles—whatever it’s called, I think. But you don’t get the _atmosphere_.”

“You can’t tell me you actually _like_ this atmosphere,” Aziraphale said, with so much distress that Crowley couldn’t keep a straight face. “It smells of beer. And the music. Pounding—my head is going to be killing me tonight.”

“It’s got a beat, it’s fun,” Crowley said. _Dance with me_. Fireworks in his head making him grin like an idiot.

“It’s worse than _bebop_.”

“It’s dance music.”

“For whom? Rhinocerotes?”

A young woman wearing a striped shirt approached them hesitantly. “Excuse me, sirs. You’re meant to be wearing the shoes.”

“I will not wear the shoes,” Aziraphale cried in indignation. He whirled upon the poor girl like one of his so-called rhinocerotes. On seeing her pale face, he calmed down. She was young, probably a student. Aziraphale did know some things about the human experience, and sometimes, he remembered them, particularly when he was faced with a young woman who was clearly not getting paid enough to deal with him. “Dear girl,” he said, “I am perfectly capable of not slipping while also not looking like a clown, thank you.”

The girl looked at Crowley, who looked down at his feet, then up at her, grinning.

“Er—” she stammered.

“Look—forget about the shoes,” Aziraphale said.

He fluttered at her with his hand. Her eyes became very relaxed, and she walked away, probably the luckiest employee there.

The angel, satisfied, turned to the scoreboard. His face dropped. “Oh, bother. I don’t suppose that’s very good.”

“S’allright. You’re doing better than me.”

“I don’t understand this sport.”

“I don’t think it is a sport,” Crowley said. He considered saying it louder, at a volume audible to others around him, to get some demonic interference done and maybe start a fight, but he didn’t want to give Aziraphale an excuse to suggest they go home early. He wasn’t sure if he’d be invited to the bookshop this time. “More a game.”

“I don’t like this game, then.” Aziraphale went to sit on one of the chairs, but before he did, he gave it a once-over. He frowned at it, then changed his mind. He gave Crowley a pathetic look. “I miss croquet.”

“Then we’ll play croquet.”

Aziraphale gave him a dubious and withering look.

“I mean it. We’ll add it to your bucket list.”

“I don’t think that’s necessary.” Aziraphale picked up a ball and flung it in the general direction of the lane. “Fiddlesticks. Anyway, as I said, I’m not particularly interested in sporting activities at the moment.”

“We’ve got to find _something_ new to do,” Crowley said. “We could—take up dancing classes. Teach you to dance to modern bebop.”

_Dance with me_.

“Do be sensible, Crowley. What is it with you and ‘new’?”

“We’ve been alive six thousand years, angel.”

“And I don’t regret a single moment of them that I’ve spent _not_ doing the worm.”

Brilliant, dazzling lights flashing behind Crowley’s eyes, completely blinding him. Making it perfectly reasonable that he should only knock down one of the pins on his next ill-fated throw.

“Or whatever it is they do these days,” Aziraphale was saying. “The twist? Fake scuba diving?”

“We could go _real_ scuba diving.”

“Will you calm down?” Aziraphale gave him a flustered look.

Crowley shuffled over to him and made him put down the ball he was holding. “It’s like this,” he said, waving his fists in the air, wiggling his elbows. “This is how they dance now. Right?”

“What has gotten _into_ you tonight?” Aziraphale stammered. But now he was smiling.

“Did you mean ‘sensible’ in the ‘having sense’ way, or the ‘sensibility’ way? Do you want me to be more like Marianne Dashwood? Been too long since you’ve read your Jane Austen?” He was still wiggling around in front of the angel, who was biting his lips to keep from laughing. Crowley said, “Don’t tell me you’ve started to adopt the modern definitions of words?”

“_Crowley_, you’re like a _firecracker_,” Aziraphale said, and he finally split at the seams, letting out fits of cackles and giggles. His eyes flashed, rather fittingly, little wrinkles around them like sparks. He hunched himself over and grabbed the still-wobbling Crowley’s elbow, trying to pull both of them down into a seat. “Come, come sit down, you’re going to attract attention.”

“I—” Crowley said.

Then his foot hit the lane. It nearly slid out from under him. “Whoops!” he cried, grasping at the angel’s sleeve.

Aziraphale righted him, then nearly slid himself. Then he was laughing so hard that it was silent, and his eyes were screwed tightly shut.

“Dear—perhaps we—really ought to leave.”

“Yes,” Crowley said, marveling at the way the angel’s voice deepened when he was trying to speak without being able to breathe, and said, his own voice cracking, “Perhaps—”

Another employee had strode over to them, likely the manager this time. She was actually carrying two pairs of hideous neon-green-and-burgundy shoes.

Aziraphale straightened up at once and immediately started berating her. He pointed at the shoes as though they were some sort of toxic weapon that he refused to let anywhere near him. Crowley should have tried to hold him back, but he was too busy trying not to fall over from laughing. It was, admittedly, more difficult without wearing the appropriate footwear. Aziraphale raged, in the way only someone who had once been both an ancient Greek philosopher and an upright Victorian gentleman could rage, and Crowley watched on.

In spite of some empty threats, the shoes lived on to see another day. The manager was lucky as well—she got to keep her memories, under Aziraphale’s determination that she should remember everything he had said to her, but she received nothing worse. In the end Crowley had to drag the angel out of the building.

“Positively ferocious, Aziraphale,” Crowley half-chided, half-praised as they moved across the sticky carpet towards the exit.

“I wasn’t that bad,” Aziraphale tutted.

“_Ferocious_.”

And he thought, _As long as you’re on my side. Always be on my side. Let’s charge into battle together._

“’Ferocious’,” Aziraphale repeated, doubtfully, but almost a little proud.

Crowley nodded. And he thought. And he couldn’t stop thinking.

Because in the old days—in the _old days_—and Crowley was deep in it, now—the closest bond hadn’t been marriage, it had been the bond between two people fighting for survival, together. And the rush hadn’t been from the possibility of brushing past each other in a world where touching had been squashed out of society, he thought as he held the angel’s arm and dragged him towards the door, but from clasping hands and wrists and looking each other in the eye and giving each other courage, from facing forward together and protecting something together, and he remembered that, too. He remembered when they had done that, too. _Dance with me. Let’s take on the whole damn world together_.

Which didn’t make any sense, because ‘take on’ was exactly what they didn’t want to do with the world—it sounded like it was something they had to survive. If anything, the world had to survive them. If anything, they wanted to protect it. The two of them.

Outside, the night air was cool and calm, and Aziraphale took several deep breaths of it. His heart was still beating rapidly. He wondered if he could slow it down with a miracle, and found that he didn’t dare. He realized Crowley was still holding his arm. He didn’t dare. Some things you simply didn’t give up.

“Perhaps,” the demon was saying, “you could consider being a _little nicer_ to the humans only doing their job, the next time around?”

“It was simply a reaction of self-defense, my dear,” Aziraphale said. “And I don’t know what you mean by ‘next time.’”

“The next time someone brandishes a hideous garment in your direction. Although I don’t blame you for attacking her when she criticized your shoes. I know how much you like them.”

“That’s not exactly reassurance that what she said wasn’t true.”

“No, no. They’re great, angel. Very _you_.”

Crowley swiveled, letting Aziraphale’s arm slip away, only so he could look at him. Up and down. He raised his eyebrows pensively, then nodded once. “I like this,” he said, poking the red tartan sweater-vest that Aziraphale was wearing. “I forget. Sometimes you do color.”

Aziraphale didn’t reply, raising his hand to his chest, where it had been, the peculiar ghost of Crowley’s touch.

“When you do, you go bold,” Crowley commented. Always, these days, with a note of friendly amusement in his voice.

They had wandered across the pavement and were now standing near a circular stone fountain, because of _course_ there was a fountain, the exact type of landmark that always heightened every emotion taking place around it a hundredfold. It had a statue of a horse in the middle of it, and a man who had probably been famous once riding the horse, and there was water around the base that was positively glittering with coins. The fountain wasn’t running at the moment, but it was still all aglow. If the water started right after Crowley said something particularly enchanting, Aziraphale was going to turn the man in the statue into something embarrassing.

Crowley tilted, still dizzy and a little breathless, towards the edge of the fountain. He leaned against the tall concrete rim and peered down into it. Aziraphale cautiously joined him and sat on the edge. He hoped Crowley wouldn’t look up at him, and wondered why he would have sat himself there if he hadn’t been hoping for precisely that.

“I mean, if you’re human,” Crowley said, at once dreamy and energized, “then you can only do human things to have fun. I guess that’s what you do then, isn’t it? Dance whatever style of dance is ‘in’ while you’re alive?”

“I think they’re aware of the others, ones from the past” Aziraphale said. “I think there are historical dance societies, and the like.” He thought, _We only do human things for fun, too_, but that felt like it was edging into dangerous territory, so he thought better of it.

“I wonder if they do what’s popular now because they don’t really think about it,” Crowley said. “Or if they do it willfully, knowing full well that they could have been born in a different time and everything would be different, only this is _their_ time, happening _now_, while _they’re_ alive, and so they joyfully embrace it and live in the short snapshot of time as they know it and _make_ it what it is.”

_Just like us_, Aziraphale thought. _Just like me, to not do that, and just like you to seize the day_.

“_That’s_ what it is,” Crowley said wistfully. “To make the world your own.”

Aziraphale slid off of the edge of the fountain onto his feet. Crowley looked at him as though only now registering that he had been there. He looked back at the fountain, then pulled himself up onto the edge. For an alarming moment, the angel thought he was going to stand on it and start some sort of speech, but Crowley sat down and dangled his legs over the rim. Aziraphale stared at his friend’s feet, and the light scale pattern that trailed up to the just-visible hint of his ankles.

“We could _go_, Aziraphale,” Crowley said.

Aziraphale looked up into his face. He was speechless.

Crowley seemed to take that simply to mean that he was confused. “Aurora borealis. They say it’s been gorgeous lately. We have money, Aziraphale, we can just get on a plane and go!”

“_Oh_,” the angel said, trying to make it sound gently dismissive, but Crowley’s voice had been so quiet and fervent and earnest. “We can’t simply—simply leave on the spot.”

“You’re thinking like a human,” Crowley said. “Like you’re a fragile creature surviving only through your delicate routine and if you break it all hell will break loose. We don’t have to be like that, angel. We’re free.”

Actually, Aziraphale wasn’t thinking like a human at all. Humans knew their time was limited. A thing like this could only come around so many times in their lifetime. He was thinking like an immortal being. Plenty of time, there would always be another aurora borealis.

Crowley might not always be looking at him like that at the front of it.

_ Maybe he’s right_, Aziraphale thought. _Or maybe I am. Maybe, whoever you are, you have to make the most of your time_. If he only had a limited quantity.

What would you do if you had to live a life?

Crowley grinned at him.

Aziraphale thought, his mind’s words vicious and triumphant, _Well, what the bloody hell did he think he was doing?_

“Oh, all right,” he said. It sounded so nonchalant. Nothing like the trumpets going off inside his own mind.

“_Yess_,” Crowley hissed, closing his eyes and leaning his head back, face angled up at the sky, sounding nothing like the fireworks that were inside his head, unless they were heard from very far away. Aziraphale didn’t know how he knew they were there, but he could almost hear them.

“Well,” the angel said, half-worry and all nervous energy and for some reason smiling and frowning at the same time. “It’s like they say. _YOLALO_, and all that.”

“What?” Crowley said, his eyes snapping open.

“Never mind,” Aziraphale said, blushing. “Oh. You’ve lost your glasses.”

“Huh. When did that happen?”

“I’m not sure. Hopefully not at skittles. No, I’m sure we would have seen if someone had been staring—”

“Unless—oh no.” Crowley stared at him with wide eyes.

“Ah,” Aziraphale said.

“You don’t think—”

“Perhaps my tirade at the poor woman only doing her job was not as intimidating on its own as I thought,” Aziraphale said sadly. And then he giggled.

“I dunno,” Crowley said. “I think, the way I was looking at you while you were giving it, I don’t think my eyes could have looked _that_ scary.”

Aziraphale blushed even more. The fountain stayed quiet. Moonlight glimmered off of its still surface. “I think we ought to go home, before someone sees us.”

Crowley nodded, and slid off of the fountain’s edge. He leaned toward Aziraphale, and the angel thought for a paralyzing moment that he was going to take his arm again, but he had only been regaining his balance.

“You were perfectly intimidating on your own, angel,” Crowley said, but he said it in a voice like moonlight on a fountain.

They walked, side by side, across the pavement, towards home.


	8. Break

Crowley had asked Aziraphale ‘When was too soon?’ Even the demon hadn’t actually assumed they would leave for the Northern Lights that very night. That wasn’t the way airplane tickets worked, especially when a certain angel was refusing to let a certain demon bump innocent passengers out of their seats, and even Crowley wasn’t comfortable enough with flight technology to attempt miracling them some extra seats right on the plane. He had asked when would be ‘too soon.’ Aziraphale had said, ‘Why don’t we go tomorrow afternoon?’

Crowley had stared at him agog.

‘If we don’t go soon, I’ll never feel up to it,’ Aziraphale had explained, worriedly and tiredly, but then he had felt guilty. Crowley was so looking forward to this. He would _not_ be a downer.

The problem was, that Aziraphale—was like layered clothing. He was like cotton and wool. Like cotton fluff, like he had it wrapped around him and stuffed in his ears and covering his eyes. It was a comfortable, but lacking existence. It was why he was distanced from everything, and why everything was muffled to him. He supposed it was a defense mechanism, after all those years, watching horror after horror, some of them sanctioned by his own side. Most of them simply ignored by it. He’d heard too many prayers to be open to listening. If his heart had truly been open, how could he have managed it?

But he didn’t really believe that. If he’d been emotional about it all, then how could he have shut himself off? Crowley didn’t. No, he thought it was more likely some fundamental aspect of who he was. Something that had been there since the beginning, that was at his core, incurable. It wasn’t a disease, merely the lack of extra life. Everything hovered around the same level. Didn’t get too upset, didn’t get too happy. Just a sort of balanced calm with which to regard a harrowed world. He could enjoy things, and then he could stop, and then he could go home. He didn’t really ache for things. It felt like missing half the world, sometimes, this numbness, but he couldn’t help it. Cotton fluff.

It took a lot to pierce through all that. Sharp Crowley, all edges in black suits and bright eyes like flames, but not really, except perhaps the bright yellow flames of the sun—that could peek through. But just barely. Not enough. Not as much as he deserved.


	9. Chapter 9

On the plane to Norway, Crowley in the window seat watched the sun set below the clouds over which they hovered. It was a poetic sort of view, for someone like him, to see the world from above again. To see something as brilliant as the sun sinking down below. He could have thought about what that meant for a demon. Instead he was thinking, _Humans did this. They get to see the tops of the clouds now. They did that for themselves._

Everything was turning pink and lavender.

Aziraphale sat in the aisle seat. He had less of a tendency to glare at people as they walked past and bumped him with their bags. He also had less of a need to be seated in a corner, to have something at your back and your side to sprawl against. Crowley was truthfully more curled into the corner than sprawled, but it was an option nonetheless.

To look out the window, Aziraphale had to lean into him a bit.

None of this was intentional or planned, but simply happened because the order of the universe said it should be so.

“You once asked me,” Aziraphale said in a low voice that barely carried over the hum of the plane, “why God made the sky turn pink during sunsets.”

Crowley’s lip twitched. “That was a long time ago.”

“You ask every time we see one.”

Crowley turned to him and raised an eyebrow.

Aziraphale smiled softly at the window. He looked so—_content_. “Not out loud,” he said. “Not since the first time. But I could see you asking, every time. In your expression.”

Crowley felt strings tighten in his chest. He felt a sort of aching, yearning for him that was normally only felt during certain songs played on a piano. Vibrations and echoes of strings.

“They sky,” Aziraphale said. “It’s always—beautiful.”

“And nobody lives there,” Crowley said. “Not even angels. Humans think you should, you know. Heaven. Live in the clouds.”

“Only humans would think of living in the clouds,” Aziraphale said with a small smile.

“It’s not a half-bad idea.”

“You don’t _live_ in the clouds,” the angel said. He sounded more disturbed now, something bothering him, a ripple through his contentment. “Then you couldn’t—you couldn’t _see_ them.”

“What?” Crowley asked. He added, when the angel was silent, “What? You could still see them. Angel, what do you mean?”

Aziraphale settled back in his seat in a very un-settled way, worried eyes staring ahead. Not worried—something else. His hands were clasped in his lap. Shoulders squared. Crowley wanted to rest his head on one of them, to show him that it was all all right.

No, that was only his own thoughts, and wishful thinking. His own language he’d made up on his own. Sometimes he felt like he couldn’t speak to the both of them at once.

He leaned his head back against his own chair instead and closed his eyes as the sunset ended and the plane went dark.

Everything would be fine. He didn’t need to ask for anything, not anything in the whole wide world.

“What do you _want_, Aziraphale?”

Aziraphale turned, rather startled, to the demon, who looked himself as though he had betrayed his thoughts more than he would have liked. He looked abashed, and Aziraphale was both pleased and mortified at himself for it. He was so tired of feeling relieved.

They had made it to Norway, left the airport, and finally reached the cabin where they were staying. It was small and out-of-the-way and, Crowley had joked, would have been entirely terrifying had they not been immortal beings capable of miracling away any dangerous animals, people, or ghosts who happened to pass by. Without these threats, or the fear of running out of food and water, the place was adorable and cozy as could be. One of the benefits of not being human, Aziraphale had thought.

Of course, there were some problems too big to miracle away, such as the fact that the weather was simply atrocious on the day after their arrival. Their eyes would have frozen before seeing the lights, if the cloud cover hadn’t been bad enough. They had decided, instead, that they were going to call a cab to take them into town and to go to the tiny cinema that was there. The Northern Lights would have to wait just one more day.

“I thought perhaps a comedy,” Aziraphale said tentatively. “As it’s been rather dreary—”

“That’s—” the demon said. He sounded as though the words were being pulled from him by force. He added, wincing, looking, this time, as though he were saying the words only with great effort. “That’s—what I meant. Sure.”

Aziraphale stared at him. Stonily. He could feel it in his eyes. Sometimes he didn’t know how he could be so cold. He said, drily, “Was it?”

Crowley scuffed his foot along the floor. If they were going to catch their cab, they ought to leave now. The demon’s face looked out of shape.

“I don’t want to be cruel,” Aziraphale said lowly.

“You’re never cruel.”

The angel scoffed. He looked at the ceiling, then at the houseplants, not near as lush as Crowley’s but welcoming nonetheless, then back at Crowley. “_You’re_ never cruel,” he said. “And don’t try to tell me that that’s an awful thing to say to a demon, because you’ve just insisted that I’m nice, for _some_ reason.”

“I didn’t say you were _nice_,” Crowley said, with half a smile, and it was _such_ a lie.

Aziraphale pressed his lips together. He frowned at Crowley. “I don’t want to talk about me.”

“You don’t want to talk about _you?_”

“Does that seem unusual?”

“I only asked what you wanted to see at the theater.”

“_Did_ you?”

“Angel,” Crowley laughed. “I’m not trying to _critique_ you. I just—can’t imagine. Why you wouldn’t want to talk about yourself.”

Aziraphale stared at him. He felt, genuinely, consternation. Crowley stared back. “Why,” Aziraphale said, “_would_ I?”

Crowley’s brow furrowed, just a little, making him look concerned for him above his dark empty glasses.

“More to the point,” Aziraphale said crisply. “Why would you _think_ I would?” It had all gone downhill so fast. Maybe waking up after having fallen asleep on the plane, to realize that he was there, a few inches away from Crowley, in an entirely different and new place, and both of them looked positively miserable and freezing. Perhaps it was only that. A plane headache. Perhaps it was the fact that for a moment, the demon’s face had been pink from the light of the sky outside the ridiculously tiny airplane window and Aziraphale had felt perfectly happy. That hadn’t lasted. It never _lasted_.

“I’d talk about you.”

“Oh, _do_,” Aziraphale replied, hopefully with enough vitriol that it made it clear he was being sarcastic. Crowley _could_ talk about him. Oh, that would be a sight to see. He didn’t think he could bear it. Crowley was far, far too smart to scrutinize him and come up with anything truly good to say.

Except what Crowley said was, “I think you need to figure out what you want.”

Aziraphale’s palms felt clammy. The cab was a no-go, then. He wondered if the cabin had extra-strong heating to compensate for the weather outside, or if the moisture beaded on his forehead was just him.

“I mean,” Crowley said quickly. “What you want to do. With your life. Your bucket-list.”

“Oh, _Crowley_,” Aziraphale said, although he was a bit relieved. “I’ve told you, I—”

“You’re too _smart_, Aziraphale, to go around wasting your life in tiny rooms!”

The angel gave him a sideways look. “I _like_ tiny rooms.”

Crowley groaned and leaned back, letting his head hang, covering his face with his hands. “I mean—I mean—”

“I think I _know_ what you mean, Crowley.”

His voice had been small when he’d said it. Crowley stood up and looked at him.

_Don’t make me talk about myself,_ Aziraphale thought desperately. Not now. Not this. _And most of all—don’t talk about you_.

Crowley’s arms hung limply at his side. He stood not-quite-straight. Aziraphale thought, _Just talk about the world. The whole wide world. Your world. I can hear you talk about the world for ages, so long as I’m not in it._

Crowley let out a breath, but it somehow only made him seem bigger. He stood taller. He said, “If only you knew how much you _were_.”

Aziraphale let the words sink in. He felt very small. Inadequate. At the same time, he felt far too large. Like he was taking up all the space in the world for himself.

“I feel—” the angel said, cautiously.

Crowley gave him such a look, one that was so reassuring, that he thought he would love him forever for it.

“I feel—“ Aziraphale went on, pathetically, “like watching a comedy.”

Crowley nodded. “Right. Comedy it is, then.”

“Because,” Aziraphale said, “I feel that—things have been—rather too serious lately.”

Crowley was still nodding.

Aziraphale touched the back of his hand to his mouth. There were things that needed to be said. Might as well be now, now that he had diffused the situation with perhaps the lamest excuse for extended metaphor ever, but at least it was an _attempt_. He was no ruddy good at any of this.

Crowley was asking him, perhaps, he _thought_, about his innermost heart’s desire. Aziraphale didn’t think he had one.

He could explain to him that he simply wasn’t that type, only it felt like a more serious conversation. And Crowley had his bloody glasses on. It could have been said at any time when he had had his glasses off. But here he was, trying to explain things now, and it wasn’t _right_ to talk about them now, he could never find the right moment, and in all their eternity together, he had never once chosen the right moment for anything.

“I’m not—” he started. He didn’t know how to say it, say any of it, he didn’t even know if he should be saying it. If that really was what Crowley had meant when he’d asked him, _What do you want?_ Except he did. He knew what Crowley wanted. And he said, because Crowley was counting on him, slowly, “I’m not—_good_—at wanting things.”

There was a hideous moment of silence in which he fully expected Crowley to scoff, only he didn’t.

“Before you say anything,” Aziraphale rushed on nevertheless, “I know what you’re thinking. I am—_plenty_ good at wanting things. Gluttony is probably my worst sin. Er. That is, I am fully aware that when I want something, some sort of food or book or—or just some peace and quiet, some time away from things—I get it. Take it, I mean. For myself. Regardless of the consequences.”

Crowley was silent.

The angel took a deep breath. “But this is different,” he said. He had never heard his own voice sound like that before. He would have marveled at it, if he hadn’t felt so miserable. “Because I’m not supposed to want to take something from someone else. This time is different, because this time it matters, because it’s _you_.”

He took another breath. This one was shallower, as though his lungs didn’t have room enough in them. He couldn’t look at Crowley anymore, glasses or no.

“And all I want is for you to—but that’s a lie.” Aziraphale put a hand to his head in exasperation. “I want things that are incompatible. Love is completely incompatible.”

Crowley gave a tiny jolt, as though he hadn’t expected them to be having this conversation, as though they hadn’t been having it the entire time. His calm and reassuring expression wavered only for a moment. He valiantly stuck it back on, for Aziraphale. The angel knew this. Always for him.

“How can it possibly work?” Aziraphale said wretchedly. “To ‘be in love’ is to want someone to be completely happy, to want nothing more than that, that is the _most important thing in the world_, and yet you also want _more?_ You want something from them? Everything? How can you want everything for someone and everything from them at the same time? And call that love? How can that be—” He searched desperately, furiously, for a word. “How can that be—_right?_”

‘Good’. ‘Okay’. ‘Acceptable’. All had come to mind. But he thought he had yelled at Crowley rather enough for the night, so he took a few breaths to calm himself down. When he looked back at Crowley the demon looked, of course, tortured, but also almost smiling, and Aziraphale was so very sick of paradoxes.

Crowley was shaking his head. He stared at Aziraphale, presumably, because he was wearing his sunglasses, and said, “‘Right.’”

Aziraphale bit his lip. “I didn’t mean—”

“Angel.” Crowley took off his glasses, like it were the easiest thing in the world. He gave Aziraphale a look that was almost pitying. “You don’t have to be _perfect_.”

Aziraphale’s mind stalled. ‘Being perfect’ was not something that had occurred to him to try for a very long time. He stared.

Crowley’s eyes were adjusting to the light. Once he had finished, he refocused on Aziraphale, and then the angel had to face him, eyes unmasked and all.

“I don’t want to _ask_ anything of you,” Aziraphale said, exhausted. “And yet I do. I want two things that go directly against each other and I cannot handle it.”

“But I—” Crowley ran a hand through his hair, then down his face, across his eyes, over his mouth. It stayed, curled up, by his lower lip. He breathed in. He said, voice raw, “I want you to ask me for things.” He looked up at him questioningly. Asking him to understand. “I _want_ you to.”

They stood in the still room, plants breathing around them, neither of them remembering to. Not human. Barely even whatever he was supposed to be.

“I don’t _do_ those sort of things,” Aziraphale said quietly. “I can’t _do_ them.”

“If you said you didn’t _want_ to,” Crowley said, matching his tone, but with a hint of urgency. “Then I would leave you alone forever.”

Aziraphale felt a minor panic until he understood that he didn’t mean _leaving_ him, simply ‘not bothering’ him anymore. About this. ‘Bother’ still felt like the wrong word. Crowley could upset his entire being, but never bother him.

“But,” Crowley said, taking a step forward. “You never _say_—”

“I can’t—” Aziraphale interjected_. Feel things. I don’t feel that much_. “I am not—reliable.”

Crowley was looking at him as though he were insane. Aziraphale frowned. He felt, disproving his own thoughts, about as numb as a beehive.

“You’re not _what?_” Crowley said. “You’re the—Aziraphale—do you even know _yourself?_”

Aziraphale gave him a weak smile. “I think you’re rather proving my point.”

Crowley stared at him, bewildered. Then he deflated, not in a sad way, simply in an amused acceptance of defeat. He let out a breath, eyes closed, mouth slightly open in a small smile. “All right,” he said. “All right. You _did_ surprise me, after all, picking a _comedy_.”

“Oh, never mind,” Aziraphale said, rolling his eyes, and permitting himself, at last, to relax. He was falling back into himself. Distance between what was thought and what was said once more seemed like an option. How could they be real thoughts when he was so very good at hiding them?

He stepped forward and patted Crowley on the arm. Then he headed towards the coat rack. “You pick the film tonight. Comedy or no. If we hurry, we might just make _one_ of them.” _How could I sound so calm?_ he thought. _As though none of this matters at all._

Crowley touched his own arm where Aziraphale had patted him with admirable subtly, smiling with almost as much surreptition. “Right,” he said, his voice sounding more normal than it had all night. “On we go, then.”

“Into the night,” Aziraphale said. “Bring a coat. It’s cold.”

Crowley grabbed a coat, and they walked through the door. Aziraphale went to head down the long pathway that wound around to the street, and before he could round the first turn, he heard Crowley calling, from behind, his voice amused, “And, Aziraphale? If you wanted to see a comedy, we would be seeing a comedy.”


	10. Chapter 10

Somehow, Crowley hadn’t thought of this. Being on a voyage with Aziraphale meant being on a voyage with Aziraphale _the whole time_, not just during the moment he’d been waiting for. Somehow, he’d imagined going off to see the Northern Lights as a leap in time in which they were all of a sudden there, transported out of normality and the confinement of their lives, under the dark night sky with magic happening above them, out of time and space. He’d forgotten about all the daytime they would have to sit through first to get there.

Human lives, he thought, were always like that. Even with all his and Aziraphale’s miracles and catching the quickest flight, not having to move around jobs or worry about money, they still had to wait around, to live through every moment, and they didn’t even have it half as bad as people did.

It was daytime. Aziraphale was hovering by the cabin window, looking out at the perfectly blue sky. He was holding back the curtain even though you could see through plenty of window already. Crowley had been pretending to read one of the books that had been left in the cabin by a previous renter. It seemed an odd sort of reversal of things. Then again, Aziraphale wouldn’t have been interested in this particular book even if it had been a first edition, and the state of its worn cover and frayed edges had probably given him heart palpitations, the perfect explanation for why he had left it on the coffee table for someone else. And he was probably looking out the window with that worried expression, more impatient even than Crowley, for once, because he didn’t want to be here.

Did he?

_What do you want?_

Crowley closed the book—that is, he put it down, and its bent paperback cover remained in roughly the same curled position in which it had already been. He stood up.

Aziraphale turned to him.

“It’s night somewhere,” Crowley said, trying to sound chipper.

“What—does that mean?”

“It means, I’m tired of sitting around,” he said. “Let’s just go somewhere.”

“Honestly. There are only a few hours of sunlight in a day up here, and you can’t even—”

“_Angel_.”

Aziraphale gave him a wry look, but then he went to get his coat.

Crowley had the sudden panicked thought that he had made him do everything, all of it, from the very start, just out of sheer annoyance. It wasn’t new—the first tempter, and all that, he’d had that doubt before, that maybe the angel never really wanted any of it, and just went along with him because Crowley was so very, very persistent. But he’d always thought—always _hoped_—that he did enjoy it all, really. All their outings and goings-on. That he just needed a ‘push’. What kind of _friend_ was he? Had he ever listened a day in his life?

“Wait, _stop_,” Crowley said, sounding too blessed snappy instead of as guilty as he felt. He rushed over and grabbed the angel’s coat, which Aziraphale had half taken off the rack. “_Stop_. Never mind.”

“Will you—” Aziraphale said, wrestling with the coat, possibly sounding amused, possibly really angry and Crowley had just been misjudging that all these years, too.

“Just—forget it—I’m sorry.”

“What are you sorry for, you are allowed to wan—” Aziraphale cut himself off and sighed. Or perhaps he had breathed in. He looked as though he had figured something out. “_Crowley_—”

“Just—put it back.” Crowley grabbed Aziraphale’s hand, the one that was still clinging adamantly to his coat, and gently forced him to let it go. He put the coat back on the rack. He let go of the angel’s hand. He stared down at it.

“Crowley,” Aziraphale said, soft and exasperated. “I just don’t want you to get _cold_, staying out there longer than we have to.”

“Angel,” Crowley said snippily. He was driven by the desperate need for the truth, and like always, paradoxically, uselessly, it made him sound angry with Aziraphale, asking for the truth in a tone that was the least how he truthfully wanted to speak to him. “Listen,” he said. “Do you actually want that ring I gave you?”

The angel looked surprised. Then he looked guilty. “I—”

“Because if you don’t, you can just give it back. You don’t have to take it just to be nice—”

Aziraphale reached up and touched his own neck, and it was such a vulnerable and out-of-place gesture that Crowley stopped speaking. Then he realized that the angel was tugging on an impossibly thin chain that he’d been wearing. Crowley hadn’t even noticed. Aziraphale pulled the chain, and the ring that he had hung from it, out from underneath his sweater where it had been for who knew how long.

Crowley stared.

“It,” Aziraphale said quietly, “didn’t fit my finger.”

Crowley made an odd noise in the back of his throat that made him realize his mouth was open. He said, numbly, “What’s the point of wearing a ring that’s exactly your style if people can’t see it?”

Aziraphale looked as though he were a million miles away.

Then he looked Crowley in the eye, and he was right there.

Crowley tried not to say ‘oh’. He tried not to say ‘ah’, or nod, or do anything that suggested that he understood now, he knew now. He tried not to make it seem as though he thought he understood Aziraphale more than the angel could ever understand himself. People had done that to Crowley before. And not-people. It could be cruel. He didn’t want to do that to him.

But Aziraphale was still looking at him, silent, and Crowley couldn’t help looking back. Couldn’t help figuring him out. Because he knew him. He _knew_ him. He was his—his whole—

“What do you want me to tell you, Crowley?” Aziraphale said. Soft enough to break him. He was wearing that sad, kind smile that was a warning to Crowley, that either he was going to stop speaking, or whatever he was going to say next was going to ruin him.

He was warned, but it broke him anyway.

The angel said, “I could say, ‘I love you.’”

Crowley wanted to back into a wall, the sofa, something, for support, but he remained completely still.

“I—I could say, ‘Ich liebe dich,’” he went on. ‘‘Dai suki da yo.’ ‘Wǒ zhǐ shǔ yú nǐ’. Perhaps a bit old-fashioned. ‘Ti amo.’ ‘Rwy’n dy garu di.’ ‘Ik hou van je.’ ‘Ani ohev otcha.’ _Anything_.” Aziraphale said more, said it in Ancient Greek, and Polish, Portuguese, Czech, in languages from across the world and in a few languages that Crowley had long forgotten. He said, “It’s—it’s hard to say, because—because there are so many.” He glanced down at where his hands were fluttering around the ring on the chain, then he forced them down by his side. “So many ways. It’s almost too easy. But they all, they all mean something different, you see?”

Aziraphale looked up at him, and Crowley thought he was smiling, through that soft voice of his, through all the agony in it.

“I know you know what I mean,” Aziraphale went on. “Language changes, but it’s not only that, it’s—it’s how people have seen things. The concept of love, it—it changes too. I could say it in all these ways, I could—I could show you. I could put my hand on my heart and then on yours. I could give you a lock of my hair. I could—could ask for one of yours. We’ve been alive for so _long_, Crowley. I’m not like humans, I don’t know what they mean—I don’t mean things the same way they do, I guess, I’ve seen too much, seen how it all changes—but.”

He was looking at him pleadingly now. Crowley died to know what he wanted. Maybe to be heard.

Aziraphale told him, “But you’re my _everything_, Crowley. You’re my whole world.”

A sound escaped from Crowley before he could become aware of it. He tried to transform it. “That’s—that’s what I—that’s exactly what I—”

“But what if I’ve done all I can,” Aziraphale said, wringing his hands, and there was a drastic shift in tone. The angel’s face looked fragile as glass, and Crowley wished he’d let it end there, before. He wished he had just let it be, ending at that beautiful, beautiful thing the angel had given him. Aziraphale said, voice broken, “What if I can’t do the rest of it _right?_”

“You don’t have to worry about—it doesn’t _work_ that way.”

“You don’t know how it works. We haven’t _done_ this, Crowley. This isn’t _us_.”

“But it could be—”

“I _love_ us.” Aziraphale was shaking. “Why do you want to change that?”

“I don’t—”

“I will never be enough for you.”

Crowley stood in shock. Aziraphale pressed his fingers to one of his eyes, and Crowley realized it was to wipe it dry. He opened his mouth and stood there, mute.

“What if I can’t do what you want me to do?”

And then it hit him, and Crowley felt his heart shatter, and he took in a shuddering breath. He tried to compose himself. He tried to look at him more kindly than he had ever looked at another being. He said, “You think I want to change _you_, don’t you?”

Aziraphale stared back at him with that little crease between his eyebrows that meant that he simply refused to say what he was feeling. Crowley adored it, too, in spite of everything.

“Angel,” he said, gently, “just because I want to change the way _we_ are _together_ doesn’t mean I’d ever change a single thing about _you_.”

Aziraphale whispered, “Doesn’t it?”

Crowley thought about what he meant. He knew what he meant. A paradox, indeed, because he never, ever wanted them to change, and yet he wanted more so badly, and he was beginning to think what he suspected Aziraphale had been trying to say a while ago, which was that all words were a lie. Because he wanted nothing more than to comfort Aziraphale, but instead his voice felt harsh and far too loud when he exclaimed, “You realize one of the biggest reasons I want this is so I can just tell you—so I can just _say_ to you how I feel? Because yeah, we’re good now, we’re _great_, but I feel like I can never _tell_ you that. We always have to hold ourselves back, pretend we’re just—just work friends, or whatever, but all I want is to tell you exactly how much you mean—”

“But you haven’t,” Aziraphale said, simply. “All this time, you’ve never said it.”

Crowley gaped at him. Then he slowly closed his mouth as the reality sank in. He felt himself grow cold. All this time, and Aziraphale knew, because Aziraphale had guessed. Because Crowley had finally stopped denying it.

But he still had never _said_.

Crowley sank into the nearest seat. It happened to be a plush armchair. Aziraphale had several in the bookshop. Crowley had one at his flat, the standalone armchair that had never been sat in in its entire existence, because it was next to the sofa where Crowley sat, and when Aziraphale was over he sat on the sofa too, next to him.

“That’s not the point,” Aziraphale said, looking all too rational and being rather too generous, in Crowley’s opinion.

“What is wrong with me?” Crowley groaned, covering his face with his hand.

“Perhaps you’re afraid of change, too?” Aziraphale said, not unkindly. “Or, ‘old habits die hard.’ Some one of those witty things people say.”

“The things people say.” Crowley closed his eyes. “If I’d never listened to them. If I’d never gotten us into this—” He couldn’t find a word.

“I don’t suppose I regret that you did, really,” Aziraphale said, sounding surprised at himself. Crowley was too drained to fully feel his own surprise. “I mean,” the angel went on, “I think you’ve always wanted more, really. You’ve always seemed—” He sighed. “Dissatisfied. On edge. For something more, I suppose. I could never put my finger on what it was about you.”

Crowley felt miserable. He felt all the impact of _‘How could it possibly be right?’_ To want so much from someone you loved.

“I’ve always been one for words,” the angel said with a small laugh. “Guess I needed you to tell me what it was, after all, even if there really aren’t quite the _right_ words for it.”

“Aziraphale,” Crowley said, and it felt like the only _right_ word he could ever really say. “You know—you know that it’s just me failing, right? To say what I really mean. If, after all I’ve said, you think I want you to change. That you’re not enough for me. You know that that means I can’t possibly be explaining myself, right?”

The angel was silent for a moment, which caused Crowley to finally open his eyes and look up. Aziraphale was staring down at him like he very much wanted to believe him, which was at least a start.

“You know you just don’t understand, right?” Crowley said. _Please take comfort in it_, he thought. _Please don’t think I’m mocking you, or belittling you_. He regretted every single time he’d ever said anything to the angel other than the truth, anything other than _I love you_.

Aziraphale shook his head, and said, “I don’t understand humans. I don’t understand you.”

Crowley shook his head at him back, and thought, _You are human. You _are_ me_. “We both know that’s not true.”

Aziraphale smiled at him, and said, “Thank you, Crowley.”

“You just don’t understand, angel,” he said softly. “And it’s okay! Because I don’t either.”

Aziraphale nodded, the gesture of not understanding at all, anything at all, except for the phrase ‘It’s okay.’ At least for now. For now, it was enough.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thank you so much to the many people on tumblr who helped me find ways to say 'I love you' in all those different languages!


	11. Prelude, late

It got dark. The clouds had vanished. The sky was open and cold and clear above the icy world. A few stars glistened. The night was ready.

_ What is the point in wearing a ring if no one can see it?_ Crowley had asked.

_ It’s because_, Aziraphale thought, _I want—I want…_


	12. Chapter 12

They went to see the lights.

For a while, they had followed a guide. Then they had wandered off on their own. Only a little ways. It would take a miracle not to freeze out here were they to get lost, and it would take a miracle to not get lost in the expanse of white and night sky. But they weren’t human.

Two dots on the landscape stood in the snow, huddled, apart, but what was apart when it was just the two of them in the wide empty world? They were closer to each other than anything else.

The sky bloomed.

Aziraphale stared at the lights flowing through the sky like insubstantial ribbons. It was so cold that he was numb, and it was as though he could feel the lights running through him, though they were miles above them. Purple and green running through him, cold and warm.

“See?” Crowley asked, through chattering teeth and the quiet of awe. Aziraphale looked at him, because how could he not, and Crowley was looking at him, too. He looked sheepish and very cold and uncertain and decidedly happy. “Asking for things works out all right, sometimes.”

Aziraphale grinned, and turned back to the lights, because there were some things you couldn’t look away from for too long, in case it was the only chance you would ever get to see them, although his face, Crowley’s _face_—

Aurora Borealis shone above them, comforting in the way of something beautiful and distant and untouchable and impossible not to feel. Purple and green, black with speckled white stars, white below that looked almost blue, almost gold, almost like nothing at all, until your eyes blinked through the frost and readjusted, and the dark was lighter again, and you looked back up at the shimmering sky and it was almost blinding, not like the sun at all, but in the way deep purple was blinding when you first looked at it until your eyes adjusted to it and then it was all you could see.

Aziraphale watched the lights, and thought, _You can feel things. Why do you think you don’t have a heart? You can feel things _so much_._

But still there was that fear, fear of his own indifference, of looking at something or someone beautiful and simply not caring. It wasn’t happening now. It had happened before. He could send Crowley away. He could look at Crowley, whom he loved _so much_, and tell him to go away. Did it all the time. How could he do that?

How could he almost not go with him to see the Northern Lights? Nothing was holding him back except for his fear that he wouldn’t enjoy it after all.

_ It’s not indifference. It’s doubt_.

The words, finally words to help him, formed at long last inside their faithful angel’s head. _It’s fear. Of failing, of hurt, of being wrong. Of it not being as good as you expected, of it not lasting, of disillusionment, of messing it up yourself, of another crack in your heart. It’s disbelief that anything could be so good. That you could ever feel so good again. That it could be anything other than you believing something to be much better than it really is, all over again. It’s the opposite of not caring._

It’s not indifference.

Aziraphale stared at the night sky. He watched how the darkness in between the ribbons played with the light.

Crowley looked at the lights.

The whole world. The whole wide world. ‘_Never be enough._’

Why did he need it to be different? Why did he need it to be—that way? Instead of this way?

Because, truth be told, he felt a bit ridiculous waxing poetic about the angel when he sat alone every night when all he could call themselves was ‘friends’.

But that was silly. They were enough. Always had been, always would be, if he had any say over it, and always for them was a long, long time. But, truth be _told_, he still felt over-the-top, pining and longing and gazing awe-struck at a friend. Like he was the Aurora Borealis. Wanting to be with him all the time. Wanting so _badly_.

Maybe that was just a problem humans hadn’t figured out yet. How to be the way they were. That had always been humanity’s problem. So they made up words and put together boxes to try to put things in.

All he wanted was to be able to justify that. With what humans called it, if he needed to. All he wanted was some Someone-blessed _honesty_.

Colors shimmering in the sky. Beautiful. There weren’t any words.

If he could just tell Aziraphale, he would. But the angel was right. There weren’t words enough. There was nothing he could say that would be honest enough.

He wished there was something he could give him. Something that could show him how he felt, what he meant. He wished he could give him the glimmering ribbon-light sky.

Aziraphale reached over to him and wrapped his arm through Crowley’s. “Thank you,” he said, softly, still gazing at the sky.

Crowley swallowed, and looked back up, because if he didn’t he might miss it. Only one chance. Only there wasn’t, but he always felt that way. One night sky. The same one for eternity. The lights dancing across it in a slow, old dance. They would do it forever. They would show themselves time and time again.

There would only be one night like tonight.


	13. Chapter 13

Crowley slammed the cabin door, a bit more forcefully than he had meant to, and shuddered, trying to shake away the last of the frozen air. Could air be frozen? It felt like it. He nearly bit his tongue as he sat down, slumped, into the armchair and watched as Aziraphale walked, still in a daze, towards the kitchenette.

“Cocoa, my dear?” the angel asked him. “Or is it too late?”

“S’probably almost morning,” Crowley said. Time felt nonexistent. “Only it’ll not get bright until much later, so I s’pose it doesn’t really matter. No cocoa for me, though, thanks.”

“You need something to warm you up on the inside,” Aziraphale tutted. He looked at him worriedly, with the kind of familiar, casual, nit-picky worry with which he was always showering him. “I do wish you’d worn that muffler. Your _face_.” His own expression became distant, almost dreamy.

“My face,” Crowley huffed, good-naturedly enough. “I didn’t want anything blocking my view. Blocking me—feeling it all.”

“Would something covering the bottom half of your face have made you feel it less?” Aziraphale asked.

“Mm. Blocks—something, I dunno. Sometimes you have to let your face feel the cold night air. The whole world and the whole night sky.”

“Not _cold-blooded serpents_, perhaps.” Aziraphale pursed his lips. “The whole _freezing_ world.” He gave him a curious look. “Blocks you feeling it?”

“Sometimes. I don’t really know how to explain it.”

“Hmm.” It had sounded less disapproving than Aziraphale’s usual ‘hmm’s. It had sounded—Crowley didn’t know how.

The serpent stretched his leg out as far as it would go, towards the armchair across from him, and tapped it with his toe. “Sit, angel.”

“_I’m_ having cocoa,” Aziraphale sniffed. Then he smiled at him, for no reason whatsoever, and then he went into the kitchenette.

Crowley lit a fire in the fireplace without getting up, with a lazy flick of his hand. He almost thought he could still see the green lights floating around in it. He tore his gaze away when Aziraphale reappeared and sat down across from him. The fire burned warmer and brighter.

“That bag,” Aziraphale said in between sips. “To your right, on the table. That’s for you.”

Crowley gave a start and looked into it. “A gift?”

“Not quite so exciting, I’m afraid,” Aziraphale replied. His voice was more warming than anything else in the room. Crowley could have fallen asleep in it. “Some socks. Fuzzy ones, I think they’re called. Large ones. Don’t worry. Because I had a thought, ‘You know, I don’t think I’ve ever _seen_ Crowley wear socks’, and then I realized why, well, of course, your feet, only they probably really do need socks more than anyone else’s, and I don’t expect you to wear them in public—don’t go giving me that disapproving look—”

Crowley hadn’t. He was listening to him yammer on, absolutely smitten.

“But you could at least wear them in the private of your home. The bookshop. I thought.” Aziraphale sounded self-conscious. The socks were a deep red, the color of the tartan sweater Aziraphale had worn, and they were _very_ fuzzy. Then he put on a more confident tone. “An electric blanket, at least. I got that too. On account of your nature of being absolutely frigid. That, surely, you can’t argue with.”

Crowley pulled the blanket—quilted, of all things—out of the bag and gave it an appreciative look. “Gosh,” was all he could say. A whole world of words.

Aziraphale set his mug down, carefully, on a coaster, and got up from his chair. He walked over to Crowley and took the blanket from him, unfolded it, unwound the cord, plugged it into the wall behind him, then walked back in front of the demon and held it up in front of himself appraisingly. Then Aziraphale placed the blanket over Crowley, who had curled up in the armchair so as to melt into its depths, and tucked it around him.

“It should heat up in a moment or two,” Aziraphale said. He gave the scene a thoughtful look. It must have been a strange one, demon dark and golden without his glasses, stuffed into a plush armchair with an electric blanket that could only have belonged to a grandmother or the angel tucked around him. Aziraphale gave it all a fond smile.

“Mm.” It was all Crowley could say.

There was a period, when he first went from being very cold to being warm, that was painful. First it felt like the shock of plunging into the ice all over again, then it became violent stabs and shivers, and then it smoothed out to become the comforting feeling of heat pouring through you. Crowley had already gone through the painful phase, partly on their ride back to the cabin, and partly through being warmed by everything Aziraphale had done since they had gotten home. Now there was only the comfort, the warmth of the fire and the blanket and the undeniable need to fall asleep.

Aziraphale returned to his own chair. He leaned back into it, the fire crackling behind him. They made eye contact in the dim warm light for exactly the right amount of time, and then Crowley said, “I love you.”

And then, to prevent asking the angel to say it back or to talk about it further, he closed his eyes and sank deeper into the blanket, and listened to sound of the fire and his angel’s presence.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> After this, there are three more chapters. I plan to post one in about a week-and-a-half, and the last two just a few days after that. Thank you for sticking with me so far! <3


	14. Chapter 14

They went back home.

They went several days waiting.

Aziraphale felt himself stretched across time like strings, being plucked and never striking the right note.

_Doubt can be like wearing so many layers of clothing, you can no longer see yourself deep within them._

This, Crowley would have pointed out, had he heard the statement ringing in Aziraphale’s thoughts, was not the case with him. _Aziraphale_, he would have said, _you wear your heart in your clothes_. And he would have been right. But doubt made you forget.

Doubt, when you were someone who doubted everything, all the time, made the truth of you seem like lies, because the tiny variances preoccupied you, took up all your attention, until they were all you could think about. In the end, doubt made you doubt that you were doubting. It made you forget what you had always thought was true.

Aziraphale knew who he was. Ninety-nine percent of the time. He couldn’t help being who he was, and normally, he didn’t mind it one bit. Except for the constant undercurrent of thought that he might be doing something wrong.

Because wanting someone to _not_ do something was still wanting something of them. Crowley wanted to stay with him. Aziraphale always wanted him to leave, every evening, or more truthfully, every night. He wanted him to leave before something happened—before they became something else.

Why? Because he wanted them to _stay_. Because he liked what they were. He was no less selfish than Crowley, he wanted them no less, it was just that he happened to already like the them that they currently were. He already had what he wanted.

Except Crowley didn’t really see them that way. Did that mean that Aziraphale wanted Crowley to change? That he wasn’t enough for him? _Of course not. Of course not, of course not._ Then maybe he understood a little better.

_ Wanting_. It was the thing you shushed when you didn’t believe in anything. When you didn’t believe in yourself. You could do so much damage in the world, all of it started by wanting. _Shush. Shhh_. So long, you didn’t know the truth anymore. He always shushed his thoughts about Crowley. Crowley was _so loud_. But, really, he could be so soft. Perhaps it was Aziraphale who was loud. Alarms going off in his head whenever he looked at him, since the dawn of time. He’d _had_ to snuff them out. Cover them up, at the very least. Or perhaps the alarm had been the wanting from the very start.

Sometimes, Aziraphale thought, Aziraphale _knew_, because he could sense it—Crowley had a kind of song playing in him that was like violins. Aziraphale had always thought they sounded just like a heart should, almost like a human voice, wailing but more constrained and beautiful, almost like pure emotion. Always yearning. _Yes_, he thought, _Crowley is like strings, or perhaps that’s the way he makes me feel._

Crowley _should_ be loud. He should always speak up. He should never, ever quiet himself down.

That wasn’t Crowley. Aziraphale recognized, with a start, that was his wanting him. He should never quiet that down. Crowley should speak up. He should speak up about Crowley.

He called him.

“How do you know—” Aziraphale asked, tentative, “how—do you know when you’re not lying to yourself?”

He listened to Crowley thinking over the phone, and then heard him say, “D’you mean, like, what’s good or bad?”

_I mean, about what you want_, Aziraphale thought, but he couldn’t say it.

“I think that’s the whole point,” Crowley said, in his usual tone, lighter than he would have been had he understood the angel’s question correctly, but still with that energy and urgency running through everything he ever said, because he knew that it _mattered_, always, _everything_. “It’s not lying to yourself. When you don’t know, I mean, and so you think one thing, only to think about it so much that later you end up thinking something else entirely. You have to do that, ‘cause you can never know. With the world the way it is, complicated and unsolvable. You have to never know.”

_But I know_, Aziraphale thought, brow furrowed. Not about right or wrong. _About you_. Did he? How could he only know when someone, Crowley of all people, told him that he couldn’t possibly? “Do you think I’m lying to myself?” he said suddenly, realizing the implications of Crowley assuming that that had been what he had meant. “Still? After everything? I mean, I suppose I haven’t changed all that much, enough, but—”

Crowley laughed. “Aziraphale,” he said, and then he paused. He sounded like he was choosing his words carefully, but still keeping his tone light, when he said, “I think, for you, what you consider ‘knowing’ and ‘questioning’ are different from me. Like how words don’t work. Remember? We all use them to mean different things. I mean, what you ‘know’ is right, that changes, sometimes, but you always know it when you know it. That’s how thinking works for you. That’s what I mean when I’m questioning things, too. I think. It changes. I can’t ever be settled on anything. But you, you’re—settlement.” He put a joking, teasing tone into his voice, only to soften his sincerity. “It’s what you _do_.”

Aziraphale frowned. “I don’t think that makes any sense at all.”

Crowley snorted. “There you go, questioning things. You think you’re not. D’you know, sometimes I suspect that every time you listen to me yammer on about ‘what if’s, and you end up saying, ‘No, that’s not right at all’, I think that’s something you’ve decided right on the spot. Not something you’ve known for ages, but something you’ve just decided now, finally. Like you were listening to me ask a question, and then you answered it.”

The gears in Aziraphale’s mind clicked slowly into place. Crowley was questioning things. Aziraphale was acceptance. Either one was terrible on its own. You couldn’t accept just anything. You couldn’t never accept anything at all. You needed both, together, thrumming through the course of your life side-by-side, someone to say ‘Which way?’ and to look for the course and another to tell you when you were on it, safely headed towards home.

Aziraphale was not so simple as Crowley might have said. He did not simply ‘come up’ with the answers all at once. It was like hitting a million improperly made tuning forks against his mind, horrible vibrations and clashing notes, until finally the right one hit and everything was clear. It was pain and unease until it was—_settled_. Then everything became easy.

It was nighttime. It was too late, he would normally say, to start anything. If Crowley had called him at this time, a year ago, Aziraphale would have scolded him. If he’d called Crowley at this time a year ago, he would have gotten only the demon’s machine. Last year, at this time of night, if either had called the other, they would have spent the rest of the night and possibly the next morning, possibly the entire day, wondering what the other had been thinking.

It wasn’t exactly that it felt _right_, this time, for Crowley to come over. It was just that it felt like the path of questioning, the one Aziraphale usually left Crowley to take alone, or so he had thought. _If I respond to Crowley questioning things by projecting absolute certainty—if this is not because I have all the answers, but because as long as something is still being questioned, I can accept this state of things,_ that _is what I am certain of—because you have to accept questions, because they are the only thing acceptable, the only thing you can ever trust to be safe, questions and not knowing things, not deciding on a right or wrong, just like Crowley, the only one you can trust_—he thought. Crowley on the other side of the phone waited. Aziraphale thought, _Then what does it mean, if there is something I tell myself I_ cannot _be certain about, something on which I transfix myself because it is too big, too grand to be accepted without being certain, something you cannot simply settle on, and yet it is where my mind goes, over and over and over—perhaps it was because knowing it, the most terrifying thing, was only a small step away._

Aziraphale asked, “Would you like to come over?”

Aziraphale waited by the dark window of the bookshop, humming in the vibration of the two lines of his life, questioning and acceptance. Like energy running through a ley line. Two points connected.

No. Two lines, running together.

With all the lights turned on, the bookshop was still fairly dark at night. It was a dim orange light that barely made it to the end of the room where Aziraphale stood by the window. He looked out into the night through the glass. He did not lean against it, because he did not lean on things, but he felt the window like a magnet, drawing him closer, until he almost _was_ leaning forward, toward it, his forehead only an inch from the glass, his shoulder brushed by the soft fabric of his drawn-open curtains.

_What would he do, if he had to live a life?_

Headlights cut through the dark street outside, soft like the lights of the Aurora Borealis. The Bentley could not be seen through the window, but the angel could hear it roar to a stop and go silent. He stared into the yellow light of the headlights, waiting.

He thought, softly, _What on Earth else did he think he was doing?_

When the headlights went off, Aziraphale closed his eyes. And when, a moment later, the door to his shop opened, and the bell rang, he almost didn’t open them. But he did.

Crowley had almost walked past him, because Aziraphale was never standing by the window, but was always in the back, waiting for him as far from him as possible, always making him walk the farthest.

The angel grabbed the demon’s arm as he almost walked past. Crowley gave a start and spun around to face him, his expression unfathomable. He was wearing his sunglasses.

Aziraphale didn’t say a word.

“H—” Crowley said. He stopped. He started again, “What—?”

Aziraphale pushed him gently toward the shadowed wall between the window and the door, Crowley’s back facing it, not touching it, not trapping him. Aziraphale felt his hand on Crowley’s shoulder as if it contained his entire being inside of it. He looked into his face. He stood up tall and leaned toward him, and held his left hand to where it was just brushing Crowley’s face.

He kissed him, on his forehead, above his sunglasses.

Crowley froze, then started to shake. Then he grew a different kind of still.

It lasted several seconds.

Then Aziraphale moved away only a fraction of an inch and moved down Crowley’s face to his cheek, where he kissed him again. Their glasses snagged against each other and Aziraphale moved his hand up Crowley’s jaw and up further to grab his sunglasses and take them off, and he was unconscious of doing this because he was aware only of what he was trying to say, all he was trying to put into this kiss and the way he held his other hand in Crowley’s hair to hold his head still. Then he kissed him again, on the side of his nose. And then he went to move again, but Crowley turned his head and kissed him on the mouth.

And they were so close.

Aziraphale pressed against him and thought faintly about how he had never realized just how much he cherished Crowley’s face before and now it was there but still too far, and he cupped his cheek and jaw gently with his hand to let him know but he couldn’t possibly tell him enough, but it was close. And they were _so close_ to each other.

Aziraphale realized he had been holding Crowley’s glasses crushed against his chest, one finger loosed and just inside his shirt’s collar, on the bare skin of his neck. His other fingers were wrapped white-knuckle-tight around the glasses but also clinging to the demon’s shirt.

Aziraphale let go.

Crowley backed off, frowned, blinked. He looked up at Aziraphale like he was coming out of a daze. His brow creased. “I’m so sorry,” he said. His voice was hoarse. “You—you didn’t want that.”

Aziraphale shook his head. That wasn’t right.

Then what was it?

It was that he wanted so much more. If he let himself want anything at all, then he would want so much more. He couldn’t be trusted. He always wanted more.

He realized, Crowley would never be enough for him. Not because _he_ wasn’t enough. But because he was all he ever wanted, and there would never be enough of him.

Because he was _everything_.

Absolutely terrifying, the truth, but not as dully terrifying as the indifference he’d made up to hide it.

“Maybe I should go,” Crowley was saying.

“I just wanted you to know,” Aziraphale said, “that I love you.”

Crowley smiled, and said with a low, breathy laugh, “I’ve gotta admit that felt like a pretty good way to show it.”

Crowley left, and Aziraphale stood in the darkness of the bookshop in the stillness of a truth uncovered. He didn’t know things like that really happened. Epiphanies. Understanding. He hadn’t believed in understanding. He’d thought it was all just a mystery. He’d told himself he didn’t care because it was too disappointing to think that it would never happen to him.

It happened.

Crowley was matches. Aziraphale was cotton fluff.

He caught fire softly, in a quiet _whoosh_ that encompassed him in a moment.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> The end is just a few days away. Thank you all so far!


	15. Chapter 15

Crowley had told Aziraphale, once, when the angel had asked him why he was always so eager to see things change, “You and I—we’ve lost so much.”

Aziraphale, of course, had been taken aback. It hadn’t been Crowley’s usual answer, the one dealing with new exciting adventures and human innovation and the constant motion of the world. Crowley couldn’t even remember what had left him so honest that day. Aziraphale had probably thought that he was actually admitting, finally, to disliking change as well.

Until he went on, “But there’s always change. There _has_ to be. Something new, something good. Something _more_, that’s added. Things end, and so there has to be change, so it’s not the end forever. There have to be things I can look forward to. There has to be a _future_.”

He thought about how Aziraphale was never more certain of things than when Crowley was questioning them. About how it was the angel’s way of dealing with the fact that they lived in a universe that they could never possibly know. He thought about how he always needed things to change so that he could go on.

He thought, maybe, Aziraphale was what he needed to go on. Because no matter where he was, no matter where he went, Aziraphale was always different. Not from himself, but from everything else. Because there was nothing in the world like him.

_ Crowley wants you to want him_, Aziraphale thought.

He loved _them_. And what should they be? They had a lifetime. The longest lifetime of all.

So they should be _everything_.

Aziraphale decided to call Crowley at around four o’clock in the afternoon, about the time that he normally would call him, or Crowley would call _him_, to ask him out for dinner. The angel felt nervous, but in a slow, still kind of way. Everything seemed _real_. He could feel all of it. It was a marvelous feeling, and he moved slowly as though not to shake it all up too much. But he thought, quite possibly, he wouldn’t be able to scare it away, even if he tried.

He picked up the phone and listened to the tone for a minute before dialing in Crowley’s number. He waited for it to ring. Sometimes, Crowley let it go to the answering machine before he decided if he wanted to pick up or not. One ring.

A clatter of plastic, of soundwaves being opened, the sound of an answer.

“Hello?” said the line, and Aziraphale thought about how that voice was the opening to everything, and he stood for a moment letting the feeling of it fade away, like the sounds of each member of an orchestra tuning before they all stopped and it was silent only before the music was about to begin. He took a deep, rattling breath. He took a few more. Crowley’s voice over the line said, “Aziraphale?”

“You make me face myself.” He had said it quietly. Crowley did not reply right away. Aziraphale almost laughed, then shook his head. “You think it’s me not wanting to be with _you_? Around you? Of course I do. I love being around _you_, but then it changes from that, because you always make me think of me. Another one of the paradoxes of love. I love you so I want to be around you, and then you go and make me aware of _myself_ instead, the last person I want to be thinking about. And I love you because, sometimes, you make me forget myself. And all I see is you. Like they say in the songs. And then other times you don’t let me get away with that. You keep me thinking about myself. How can they both be true? But you make me face myself, and that’s the last thing I want. And maybe it’s something I need. And maybe—I never thought of this, until now, somehow—maybe it’s something _you_ want? Because you need me to think of myself, so I don’t let myself become lazy, or cruel. Because I can be quite good, sometimes, I think. Or I can be quite wrong. I only need to remember who I am and—and what I can do.”

“I _want_ you to know who you are,” said Crowley’s voice over the line, “so you can see the person I’m in love with.”

Aziraphale paused for a long time. He looked at the phone in his hands expecting to somehow see Crowley and instead he saw only his own hands. _If it’s just you, then I can do it_, he thought. _Then of course I can. But if it’s us, if we’re together, then it’s you and also me. Then you’re not my escape anymore. I can’t hide that easily. If it’s us, together, if that’s what being in love is, then I’m a part of you and that scares me._

He brushed his fingertips against his lower lip, the phone held with his other hand tight next to his ear starting to get warm, his hand starting to get tired. He listened to Crowley waiting patiently on the other end of the line.

_ But maybe we are good_, he thought. _Perhaps that’s what you mean. You love ‘us’. Perhaps that’s what you love._

Aziraphale knew. He was sure. What he wanted.

He said, breathless, “Could I please come over?”

When Aziraphale arrived, Crowley stood in between the armchair-that-had-never-been-sat-in and the faux-leather sofa that was too cold for a serpent and yet had been sat in so much that it had grown warmer from use. His hands hung restless at his sides. He was never standing in the middle of his flat when the angel came over. He always went to the door to let him in. Sometimes, he went all the way out to the street to meet him. This time he didn’t move.

_Do not be afraid_, Aziraphale thought, like an angel. It was something angels had always had to say. He wondered if Crowley had been feeling like this, all this time. Afraid because it was when you thought you had reached a conclusion that you least wanted things to fall apart. He took a few steps forward, never taking his eyes off of Crowley.

Crowley could only look back at him.

Aziraphale cleared his throat, and Crowley held his breath.

“Hearing me say it wasn’t enough for you?” Aziraphale asked it, not angrily, but gently. Sympathetically. He looked as though he already knew the answer and was just encouraging him to say it.

Crowley swallowed, then nodded.

“That’s all right,” Aziraphale said. “Saying it wasn’t enough for me, either.”

Crowley didn’t understand.

“I suspect,” the angel said, “nothing will ever be enough.”

Crowley’s face crumpled, just a little bit.

“No!” Aziraphale’s hands fluttered nervously. So much was hanging on a moment. His feet felt like lead, but he forced himself to move. He shuffled over to Crowley. He looked so uncertain. Aziraphale put his hand under Crowley’s chin, only for a moment. “No. That doesn’t mean hopelessness. I only mean—well, we’ll just have to say it in as many ways we can.”

Crowley met his eyes with only incomprehension.

“Until we get there,” Aziraphale said. “Or close enough.”

“But—do you want—”

“I want everything, Crowley.” It felt like a breath of air. “Paradoxes and all. I want—everything with you. And I’m still afraid, but I don’t care. The last time I was afraid of you, I wasted too many decades being completely alone.”

“You were afraid of me once?”

“I used to lie and say I wasn’t. It was an easy lie to tell, because it was true.” _Paradoxes_, Aziraphale thought, drunk with relief at understanding they were real and having something to believe in. “I always knew I shouldn’t be afraid of you. But when we were new and I didn’t know you as well—I already wanted to and that scared me. Not you, Crowley. Just what you could do to me.”

Crowley considered what Aziraphale was saying. “But do you want me to do anything to you?” Because he didn’t, not really, not if it meant changing him.

Aziraphale shook his head. “You don’t understand.”

“I don’t,” Crowley admitted, laughing breathlessly, and they both felt a little more like themselves. It was nice, being in this together. Not just him on one side and Aziraphale on the other. They’d done that for far, far too long—and at the same time, they had never, ever been like that at all.

Aziraphale was fiddling with something inside of his pocket. He pulled out a hand, clenched around something. “I hope you can excuse me,” he said, words fumbling. “I’m afraid I got rather poetic—or, rather, that might be a tad optimistic. It’s not really poetry. Only, you know how I love to read, it’s most of where my emotions end up _coming out_, when I read something and finally recognize some little part of what I’ve—well, anyway. And when you read a lot it just sort of happens to you, the next time you’re feeling something it all comes out in jumbled words like some of the dreadful poetry you read. Anyway, I tried to write something down.”

He handed Crowley a piece of folded-up paper, one he had held tightly in his hands so many times in the past few days that it had grown soft like the more fabric-like parchments of the old days.

Crowley took it and unfolded it.

_ I would like to classify this thing as ‘love’_

_ because that is the only place to put it where it creates more, the only way to define it_

_ where instead of taking away_

_ it is allowed to give._

“I classify things,” Aziraphale said, in a poor way of an explanation. He cleared his throat. Clasped his hands together. “I make them orderly, organize them so that I can find them—but only I, not anyone else—and I know better than anyone how remarkably impossible that is. How difficult it is to label something accurately and in a way that doesn’t make it less than what it truly is. Books cannot be classified. Not well, never well enough. There’s always some subject they cover that their classification simply cannot. Always too many, because they’re little pieces of the world, and there’s too much in them alone to classify. _Books_. Not people. Like us. Living whole lives. And you want to tell me, ‘I don’t know what we are. But I know what we _could_ be.’”

“I don’t mean it would be all we are,” Crowley said quickly. “I don’t mean—I never mean something like that could cover _all_ of _who we are_. To each other, or alone. I just—”

“I know.” Aziraphale had let go of Crowley’s chin too long ago. He didn’t move his hands now, from where he held them, fingers gently touching, in front of his sweater vest, but he wanted to. “I know. But what you’ve done—what you’ve labeled us—the box you put us in. It can make us more.” He smiled softly, shaking his head, eyes fixed on Crowley’s. His voice was hushed and incredulous when he said, “How did you do that?”

Crowley just put on a cautious half-smile and shrugged.

“We have lost so much,” Aziraphale said. “And you are the one thing I thought would never change—I _relied_ on that. We were the one thing I could never bear to lose. And then you went and—_changed_ us—and it was no loss at all. You gave us more. You gave us _more_. How did you—”

He couldn’t speak. He couldn’t go on. There was nothing more for him to _say_. Crowley watched him, hopeless, and Aziraphale knew he needed to say something, or, for someone’s sake, _do_ something, if ever he had done anything in his life then now was the time, but he couldn’t—he just couldn’t—

He said, “Crowley, I would kiss you if I could, but I can’t—I can’t—I don’t even know how to go _about_—you’ll just have to—”

“Ssssheesh, angel, you think I have any clue how to do any of this?” Crowley said with a frantic and yet finally _hopeful_ laugh.

“Oh, for—”Aziraphale said, and he reached for Crowley and pulled him closer to him and they held on to each other. They held each other close with only their tangled arms in between them, shaking partly from nerves and partly from breathy laughter, wet faces, Aziraphale beaming and trying not to lose control and turn his face to bury it in the crook of Crowley’s neck but finally understanding that Crowley _wanted him to_.

Aziraphale’s hand was on Crowley’s chest near his collarbone where it had been when he’d kissed him before, and Crowley stood still, breathing, letting the world go on around them, nothing to catch up to at all.

“The fact is that I fell in love with the world a long time ago,” Aziraphale said, quietly. He was so aware of Crowley’s face, just next to his own, in profile, but he couldn’t look at it—not quite yet. “And it broke my heart, over and over again. Just like it broke yours. And I’ve been so very scared, this whole time, of letting it happen, again and again, and it has never made the least bit of difference. Because no matter how much I’d try to fight it, I would always fall in love with absolutely everything, each and every single time. You did too, didn’t you?”

He finally looked at him, and Crowley’s eyes met his with complete and utter understanding, and still, paradoxically, a little bit of awe.

“No human ever has to live with as much heartbreak as we do,” Aziraphale said. “Or perhaps they all do, only it’s more concentrated. Only they know that it’s life. I’ve been so very afraid. And to make it hurt less, I’ve pushed it all away, felt only a little, cut back on my own feelings in a way it frightens me to know I’m capable of, controlled things that were never meant to be controlled. I knew I couldn’t possibly be _human_.”

“I’ve seen humans hurting, angel,” Crowley said, his voice hoarse. He gave him a gentle smile that could cure six-thousand years of broken hearts. “That’s exactly what they _do_.”

Aziraphale felt his throat constrict. He felt so tightened and yet so fraught, like he could fall apart at any second. He managed to choke out the word, “_Th-thank_—”

“You don’t _choose_ to love people, angel,” Crowley said. “You can’t choose not to, either. You can’t protect yourself from heartbreak. I _wouldn’t_. But then, maybe—I would. Maybe I have been. Trying to hide from it, for so, _so_ many years. But I guess the good news is—hey—it doesn’t work? Cause if we’ve been trying to hide from heartbreak, and it didn’t work at all, then that means with all our stupid running away from love, maybe it catches up to us, too?”

Aziraphale felt his breath escape from him in a dazzling wave of relief, and he smiled at him. Smiled so bright he could see his own happiness reflected back in Crowley’s face.

“You can’t _choose_ to love someone, angel,” the demon said, softly.

“Oh,” Aziraphale replied, “_but I would_.”

He lay his hand on the side of Crowley’s face, and kissed him.

Because you can’t choose to love someone, no matter what Aziraphale said, when he kissed him, Crowley believed him. He knew it wasn’t just an effort. He knew it wasn’t guilt, or reluctance to jeopardize their friendship, or just a kindness to a poor misguided demon. He knew it was love, and he hadn’t had to try, or maybe he had, because maybe he’d decided to choose him after all, and maybe Crowley ought to listen to the smartest person he’d ever known who also happened to be his best friend and the person he was in love with, for once. Maybe he had _chosen_ him and maybe that was _so much better_.

Crowley kissed him back, and Aziraphale felt the whole world under his palm and fingers, felt his _heart_, and he kissed him to show it, and Crowley felt every wonder he had ever felt all at once.

Neither Aziraphale nor Crowley broke away first, but they both stopped, or rather paused, for a moment, because they had kissed each other but they had never before stood _so close_ to each other after a kiss, in love, breathing and closed eyes flickering open and thinking _Yellow_ and _angel_ and _Crowley_ and_ I love you, _and they needed to do everything, absolutely everything.

Crowley thought about all the things he had wanted, and how he could finally tell him now, only now he could hardly find the words.

“Let’s—” he said, staring into Aziraphale’s face, looking at the whole world.

“Whatever you want, my dear.”

“Let’s—”

“Wherever you want.”

“I—just—”

Now he could finally tell him, and, now that he’d finally put them in that box, no other one seemed right at all. He almost started laughing. No, he did. He laughed, and Aziraphale started with him, laughing for the far-too-many-eth time during such a serious conversation, _highly_ inappropriate, and wasn’t that just a wonder? And wasn’t it just _them_, just perfect.

They laughed and held onto each other, and eventually they would stop, but not now. Eventually. They had that. _Eventually_, a long time for a demon and an angel.

Now was short. They’d have so many of them, too. Now and eventually and always.

A lifetime.


	16. Canon

They lay on the sofa in the back of the bookshop, Crowley stretched out on his stomach on top of Aziraphale, with his face by his chest; a wonderfully human position, full of sloth and indignity and glorious homeliness. Yet they weren’t human, they were who they were, and if there was something almost ethereal about the constant hum that came from the contented angel as his chest rose and fell under Crowley’s head, breathing without needing to, emanating grace nonetheless, then Crowley didn’t mind.

Life is long, and even longer for immortal beings, and it is impossible to remember it all. But sometimes life gives a little gift of memory, out of the blue. A flash of the feeling of who you once were and the image before your eyes of the world as you once saw it. Not enough to make you that person once again, but enough to make you remember.

Crowley’s eyes opened. But what he was seeing was in his mind, of something that had happened long ago.

“I just remembered,” he said.

Aziraphale stopped humming, his silence the question.

He remembered seeing an angel, by the gates of the garden, shining and perfect and so out of place, but different. He remembered going towards him, the very first day, thinking, _This one is going to be different._

He remembered Aziraphale through all of the centuries, and he remembered following him. Warmth and comfort in a prickly excuse for an enemy, home in a much better excuse for someone trying to pass as human, and so Crowley had followed him, greeting him every time they met as though there was no avoiding it, when really he didn’t want to, as though there _were_ ways to escape each other but neither of them could really pretend to want to try.

Crowley bent back his head to look up at the angel. Aziraphale, who turned his head downward to meet his eye, giving himself a few chins in the process, who beamed at him, whose halo of light wore itself in the crinkles around his eyes when he looked at him _like that_, who was beautiful and questioning, always ready to listen to what Crowley had to say.

And he remembered.

“Aziraphale,” Crowley said. “_I chose you_.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This fandom has been such a treasure. If you're a new fan, or an old fan, I hope you know I love you.


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